Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1981, Blaðsíða 140

148
The Collection of Wild Birds’ Eggs and Nestlings in Sweden
for frying fat (communication from Ragnar Wirsen in 1941; cf.
Wirsen, 1968, p. 120).
Stora has placed the guillemot hook in a wider context.8 In this
connection, I lack a reference to the similar implements used in
catching other species of animals. This refers to the “marten spear”,
which was called a “rivil” and is known from Harjedalen (Tánnas;
the specimen in the Nordic Museum is illustrated in Ekman, 1910, p.
151). But these implements also include the “scrapers”, which had a
wide range of uses in extracting the young of beasts of prey from
the lair or hunted and wounded animals from clefts in rocks etc.
They consist of a stick with a screw-shaped device at one end and
are similar to the implements of the same name used in the artillery
to clean the barrels of muzzle-loading cannon. The Nordic Museum
possesses such implements from Dalarna, Vármland, Vástmanland
and Vástergotland. A similar device from Sunne in Vármland is
designated a “harkrafs” (hare rake), which reminds me of what
Jakob Ekeblad, a courtier, wrote on 6 October 1652 to his father—
that, on a farm belonging to Jakob Tornskold, a commissary (on
Vármdo, outside Stockholm), he had tried out some foxhounds,
which pursued a hare so far “that he was forced to take refuge in
a cleft in a rock, from which we had to screw him out with a pole.
We took off half his skin before we got him out” (Ekeblad, 1915,
pp. 172 f.).
Nestlings were systematically collected on Gotland, where nesting-
boxes were set up for the starlings (Sturnus vulgaris). Many travel-
lers have noticed these nesting-boxes, but the best information is
given by G. Hilfeling in his travel book in 1797, in which he also
illustrates these devices (Fig. 7).
Both in Visby and in every place that I visited on Gotland, the people have
devices put out for the starlings to build their nests in, from which the young
are taken for food when they are ready to fly. These devices are called “stare
stunkor” and are fixed on the house gables, often along the whole roof ridge,
also in gardens, in trees, on hedges along fences, and sometimes close under the
windows, in order to hear these birds singing. Sometimes, there are 20—30 such
nesting-boxes on one farm, indeed, up to hundreds on large farms. The trappers
never take the old starlings, only the young and those of the first clutch, when
the old birds lay again and sit on the second clutch. ... The device is made