There is a great deal of regulation on what you can and cannot do regarding the keeping of wild birds. You can, for instance, continue to keep a found bird if it couldn't survive in the wild due to it's injuries. Otherwise you need a license and the bird must have been born in captivity which negates it's 'wildness'. You cannot deliberately set out to capture them; to do so brings prosecution. Likewise the collecting of eggs (even the collection of fragments of eggs). At the risk of prosecution I suppose, I still have my fathers boyhood collection of eggs amassed during the 1950's (prior to collecting being made illegal in 1954), in my attic. I should hand them in; perhaps there should be an amnesty similar to those for unlicensed fire-arms. They have become a textural, colourful, historical, guilty secret.
(There is an important distinction to be made here; these are eggs of common species, not the rarities which threaten the precarious survival of rare birdlife. The collection of endangered bird's eggs, indeed any wild bird egg, is an abhorrent practice and is rightly illegal. My father's small collection was but one aspect of a young boy's fascination with nature and the countryside).
And so to 'found birds' and a snapshot of my father beside a buzzard nest high in a Highland pine canopy.
How this photograph was taken itself poses intriguing questions. His companion may have scaled a neighbouring tree to take the picture, implying planning and foresight, but perhaps they both scaled the tree together and the photographer inched out onto an exposed branch to get the shot. Climbing trees, much like 'birding', is a forgotten art for children nowadays; victims of a risk averse society. Other snaps taken on another expedition, show the two with a tawny owl fledgeling which they both posed with; bloodless hunters, collecting souvenirs of a burgeoning empirical knowledge of birdlife, nature and the hinterland.
In common with some other aspects of deep local knowledge, the unseen eddies in a river where trout or salmon habitually lie or where to find sloe berries for example, bird nest sites were and still can be, a closely guarded secret. So, co-conspirators both, I picture them returning home with all that delicious knowledge held close, answering questions of 'where have you been?' with evasive, non committal generalisations. A wonderfully succinct Scottish description of a reticent, guarded or possibly shifty individual is; 'he wouldnae tell ye a bird's nest'. I imagine these two would have revealed nothing.
Flannels tucked into woollen socks, shirts pullovered, my father and his companion seem to have stepped out of Eric Ravilious's 'Boy Bird's Nesting', a wood engraving from 1927 (below).
Whilst I'm a firm believer in the quote 'Lies, damned lies and statistics', I think there is some truth in these surveys' findings; children nowadays do spend less time simply wandering and discovering. The reasons for this are multifarious and complex and these surveys don't often pick apart the nuances, but for me, the era of found birds seems to have come to an end. I imagine most of these children will only encounter and have the opportunity to hold a found bird if it's become a victim of flying into a window. I've made a point, whenever we've had the odd thrush, blackbird or other bird window strike at home (whether they've survived or not) to make sure that my children have had an opportunity to hold, examine and marvel at the beauty of a wild bird close up. It's an important lesson in the fragility of life if nothing else.