There was a time when young boys (maybe a girl or two, though that would be against their instinct) used to raid wild birds' nests and make collections of eggs. The better collectors, of course, would take one egg only. That, today, is regarded as barbaric. It is also illegal.
But, without the blessings of television cameras, without the vast literature now available on wild life, with out the money to buy powerful binoculars or telescopes, searching out the nest of the thrush, blackbird, skylark, robin and so on was the key for so many to the wonderful world of bird life. How is it that blackbirds always build nests in the same style, of the same materials? The parent birds aren't around to tell them how. It must be an inborn instinct. And so on for the thrushes, the tits: of one kind and another and all the rest.
A couple of generations ago there were, of course good books available to those with money, but nothing on the scale of today's output or relative cheapness. But television is where all the secrets are unravelled, with lenses poking even into underground nests like those of the kingfisher. The sensible collectors swore that they only took one egg (and perhaps another for swapping purposes), but even the fact of the intrusion could drive the parent birds away. Or, lead some other predator to take and consume the eggs, maybe, and wreck the nest, if not kill the sitting bird. It was another world.
This comes to mind when a friend asks if robins could be nesting now. He has several times seen a robin around an ambulance centre, where lights are always on and so heat is generated. He sees this robin with a mouthful of insects and spiders, an earwig even. Maybe, you venture, he is gathering them to present to a future mate. But the books don't give robins as possible February nesters. According to one source, the blackbird has been known to sit in this month, also the mistle thrush, the song thrush and the house sparrow. Our friend promises to keep vigil.
Viscount Grey of Fallodon wrote in the early Twenties of the "sense of delicate privilege" granted by the discovery of a nest but warned of an experience when every nest he had discovered and delighted in, was destroyed by predators which had been led there by human footprints and other marks of his presence.