Monday, July 4:
Happy birthday United States! It’s kind of funny that we think of July 4, 1776 as Independence Day, even though nobody else in the world recognized our independence until years later. Although maybe we could have done something more patriotic, all my family did today was plan how we’re going to get out of this country! Haha, that sounds a bit extreme, but really what we did was plan our trip to Spain in September. It was really fun to spend time looking at places to go and where to stay. For dinner, we of course had burgers and hot dogs, but they were unconventional because they had no meat. If you hadn’t noticed by now, my family doesn’t eat red meat. I refuse to financially support companies who torture their farm animals, so I only eat humanely raised chicken and sustainable fish. Although, I shouldn’t get all self-righteous because I don’t have enough self-control to not eat red meat in Spain. I simply cannot resist jamón serrano, a finely sliced cured ham that is so decadent it melts in your mouth, or chorizo, or all of the wonderful dishes that contain other forms of red meat. Don’t worry, though, because I will be describing all of the marvelous food in detail when I’m there, because as you now know I’m a foodie.
Tuesday - Friday, July 5 - 8
I finally have a job! I’ve always felt guilty for not making my own money, because my parents are amazing and they do so much for me on top of paying for things that I want. But this week, I started working at the Museum of Natural Sciences, identifying and sorting eggs. I thought that it would just be a volunteering opportunity like all of the other bird stuff with John has been, but he said that now that O and I are 18, he’ll give us some money!
The work was great. I worked on eggs that had been stored in an antique embroidery case. Most of the eggs were from the 1930s, which is interesting because that was after it became illegal to collect bird eggs. Some of the eggs had scraps of paper associated with them, and this was the best part of the job. A lot of the paper with the data on it had been eaten (likely by silverfish, a bug that often plagues libraries), and some of it was faded and hard to decipher. On a small piece of paper on top of a single egg, Olivia and I could read "La" and what seemed to be an "i" and two "ll"s farther down the paper. We joked that it could be a Large-billed something, and when we looked at a bird egg book (which had a many old names of birds), we saw that there was once a Large-billed Waterthrush, now known as the Louisiana Waterthrush! So we identified an egg based on a scrap of paper that was at least 90 years old!
Though sometimes it was frustrating to identify and sort eggs for hours on end, I enjoyed my time doing it. I had done some of this throughout the past few years, but only for a couple of hours at a time. It was fun to look at all of the details of an egg and try to match it to the book, and then go look in the archives of eggs that the museum already had for comparison. The most important part, though, is the data. Eggs that have slips of paper containing the egg collector, date, or location where it was found were considered to have data. It was interesting to learn to read the marks that collectors often put on eggs called “set marks.” Set marks are always written as a fraction, like ⅕, and can mean two different things. One option is that a set mark could say the eggs collected out of the number of eggs in a clutch. For example, ⅕ could mean that one egg was collected out of a clutch of five. The more confusing and common option is that the mark can be used to determine the trip in which the egg was collected. For example, 5/1 could mean that this egg was part of the fifth clutch collected during the first trip of this week.
The most important marks on eggs (besides data and set marks), are AOU (American Ornithologists’ Union) or Ridgway numbers. Both of these numbers are types of catalog numbers that are used to identify the species of bird egg. Some egg collectors used the AOU system, others used the Ridgway system. Ridgway was an egg collector who came up with his own catalog that many other collectors adopted.
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