Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1981, Blaðsíða 142

150
The Collection of Wild Birds’ Eggs and Nestlings in Sweden
other writers obviously fight shy of speaking openly about the
taking of the nestlings.
Starling boxes intended for the taking of the nestlings have also
been found in Denmark. A report from Haderslev says that a
master shoemaker in the 1890s owned 12 such boxes. When the
young were ready to fly, the hole in the box was reduced in size,
so that the young could stilí be fed, well after their time to fly.
When they were large enough, they were roasted as a delicacy (Berg,
1954, p. 40). The people of Fyn were also partial to the young of
the blackbird (Turdus merulá), which were considered to be fatter
and tastier than those of the starling, but no mention is made of
how they were caught (Højrup, 1966, p. 170). P. J. Bergius says in
his famous lecture on delicacies that, in one year in John III’s reign,
his court consumed 1934 starlings, 352 of which were young birds.
In both Skane and Bornholm, even today, young rooks (Corvus
frugilegus) are a much-appreciated delicacy.
Wild birds’ eggs have been collected in various ways in many
parts of the word. In Europe, apart from the “bird cliffs” in the
Atlantic, eggs have been collected along the sea-coasts, for example,
in Friesland, where they were collected for sale in Amsterdam (cf.
the fact that on Halligen gulls’ eggs were collected to feed the
labourers from the mainland at harvest time, Konietzko, 1931, p.
177). From the territory of the Germanic tribes on the Rhine
estuary, we find the earliest mention of egg-collecting in Julius
Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, in which he says that the people lived
on fish and birds’ eggs (IV, 10).9 But the same practice prevailed
also in the interior of Europe. K. Mozzynski briefly mentions the
collecting of duck eggs in Poland (Mozzynski, 1929, p. 24), but it
is chiefly Bela Gunda who has made a detailed and instructive study
of the subject (Gunda, 1974). Such egg-collecting was common also
among the northern Eurasian peoples of north-western Europe and
Siberia. Kerstin Eidlitz has recently compiled the information on
this subject and found reports from the Aleuts, Itelmens, Njananins,
Nentsy, Dolgans, Mansi, Komi and the Skolt Lapps and also from
Kamchatka (Eidlitz, 1969, pp. 39 ff.).
The distribution of egg-collecting boxes, on the other hand, is