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Bird Egg Update

Plainville Public Library Bird Egg Collection

Gifted by Governor John Trumbull in 1931

Data At-A-Glance

September 26, 2023

In an effort to inventory the collection holdings before sending them to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History -- after the transfer of ownership contract is completed – Plainville Public Library Director Trish Tomlinson, MLIS, recorded a number of data sets. Excel spreadsheets are attached for details. 

Please keep in mind these numbers are the most accurate layperson’s (pardon the pun) figures that can be presented from the information available. Some information is missing, unclear, or inaccurate in the original record-keeping, and some information went beyond Tomlinson’s limited knowledge of ornithology to know what it means scientifically. The scientists at Yale will have a more informed and complete picture with the most accurate counts; but, this count is likely (hopefully?) very close.

Here are some highlights:

  • There is a total of 425 sets of eggs (groups of eggs collected from the same nest at the same time).
  • There are 1714 total individual eggs; some of these physical eggs may be lost or damaged – we may know if and how many after the experts at Yale Peabody do their inspection and cataloging -- but their records appear in the log books and were therefore included in this data.
  • There are 243 different species in the collection; 72 of those species (about 34 percent) were collected in Connecticut (CT).
  • There are 207 sets of eggs collected in CT which contain 870 individual eggs.
  • Beyond CT, the collection contains sets from 32 other states, including:
    • California: 45 sets
    • Texas: 28
    • New York: 21
    • Florida: 9
    • Georgia: 9
    • West Virginia: 7
    • Kansas: 5
    • Maine: 5
    • Michigan: 5
    • North Carolina: 5
    • Pennsylvania: 5
    • Utah: 5
    • Colorado: 4
    • Massachusetts: 2
    • New Jersey: 3
    • North Dakota: 3
    • Illinois: 2
    • Oklahoma: 2
    • Oregon: 2
    • Arizona: 1
    • Arkansas: 1
    • Kentucky: 1
    • Indiana: 1
    • Iowa: 1
    • Minnesota: 1
    • Missouri: 1
    • Ohio: 1
    • South Carolina: 1
    • Virginia: 1
    • Washington: 1
    • Wisconsin: 1
    • Wyoming: 1
  • And 10 foreign countries…
    • Canada: 17 sets
    • England: 3
    • Mexico: 3
    • Scotland: 3
    • Bahamas: 2
    • Iceland: 2
    • Bohemia (now known as the Czech Republic): 1
    • Brazil: 1
    • Germany: 1
    • Ireland: 1
  • About half of the items (51 percent) in this collection were purchased from or traded with other hobbyists. Governor Trumbull gathered eggs -- with his own hands, out in the field -- in CT, New York, and Maine. Governor Trumbull himself gathered:
    • 217 sets
    • 880 individual eggs
    • 72 different species
  • The oldest egg set in the collection is from the California Murre, gathered by “Mrs. Rugg” on May 24, 1884 in South Farallone Island, CA.
  • The newest egg set in the collection is from the Red-Shouldered Hawk, gathered by Governor Trumbull on April 24, 1920 in Plainville, CT.
  • There are 244 “duplicate” egg sets in the collection containing a total of 967 individual eggs. 59 species in the collection contain duplicate sets. The term “duplicate” is somewhat misleading; like fingerprints, no two eggs are alike. “Duplicate” in this context refers to several sets of eggs gathered from a certain species, either on the same date or on different dates.
  • There are 31 sets of eggs from the Red Shouldered Hawk, the most of any other species.
  • 195 of these duplicate sets (763 individual eggs) from 45 different species were gathered by Governor Trumbull himself.
  • Governor Trumbull was active in gathering eggs from the field himself starting in 1905 and ending in 1920. The end of his collecting coincides with the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which made it illegal to collect bird eggs without prior authorization from the US Fish & Wildlife Service. It also coincided with his entry into politics in 1921.
  • Governor Trumbull often gathered sets of eggs from certain species around the same time every year. For instance, he collected 31 sets of eggs from the Red Shouldered Hawk in April of every year from 1908-1920, with the exception of 1919. The significance of this practice is unclear.

UPDATE: 06/30/2023

On Tuesday night, June 27, 2023, a session of public comment regarding the library’s bird egg collection took place at the regular (albeit rescheduled) monthly meeting of the Library Board of Trustees. In addition to attendance by the Town Manager and two leaders of the Town Council, there were six community members present who expressed opinions both for and against partnering with Yale. In addition to listening and also clarifying some details, I explained that the egg collection going to the Yale Peabody Museum would be housed in archival research storage there and would not be on physical public display in the museum; however, the eggs will be available for free public view worldwide on Yale’s digital catalog.

Following public comments and discussion, the Library Board of Trustees voted to accept the draft terms and conditions set forth by the Yale Peabody Museum. These terms exclude the possibility of a permanent loan status (as described in the original summary below), citing the following communication from Dr. Kristof Zyskowski of the Yale Peabody Museum:

“We have been advised by the Peabody Museum [legal advisors] against receiving your donation as a permanent loan. This category is now given only to collections acquired on federal lands (e.g., national parks) and housed under repository agreements. However, we can assure you that the Plainville library egg collection is both scientifically and historically too important for anyone at the Peabody now, or in the future, to consider deaccessioning. The Peabody Museum is subject to, and must abide by, the terms of university-wide policies on the acceptance of property. We do not remove all or part of any accessioned collection except under extremely special circumstances, and your collection will absolutely not be an exception to this. We take this very seriously.”

As a compromise, and to maintain a small collection of eggs in-house, we bargained for the return of any eggs in the collection that do not contain any data or have duplicate/extraneous data. Yale will accurately identify and tag these specimens for us, and they will donate to us a museum-level display case or cases and supplies that provide theft protection and safeguard from fire/water/pests, as well as UV-protective glass or similar material.

Once we have finalized our preliminary agreement, Yale will provide the Library with a draft legal contract to be reviewed and approved by our Town Attorney before signing.

The Library Board of Trustees and I are grateful to the community members who attended and respectfully participated in the public comments and discussion. Holding the Library Board and me accountable for our decisions with your due diligence and thoughtful input is valuable and necessary, and responding to gracious voices of concern is not only our responsibility as public servants, but also our privilege. Library Board members are elected volunteer residents dedicated to doing what they conclude is best for the library, and I serve under the governing authority of that Board.

As a response to some valid concerns raised during this process, all library meeting minutes dating back to the start of my tenure in June 2018 up to the present are now available via the Town of Plainville website. We hope this will aid our intention and efforts at transparency.

Background and summary statement regarding the potential acquisition of the

Plainville Public Library bird egg collection by the Yale Peabody Museum

By Trish Tomlinson, Director, Plainville Public Library

June 23, 2023

Connecticut Governor and Plainville resident John H. Trumbull donated his extensive collection of Connecticut bird eggs to the Plainville Public Library in 1931. Governor Trumbull was a member of the Library Building Committee at the time, and the gift coincided with the grand opening of the new library building. There is no mention of this gift anywhere in the Library Board of Trustees meeting minutes or the Building Committee meeting minutes from this time period. It is only mentioned in one sentence in the Library section of the 1931 Town of Plainville Annual Report, which states:

Ex-Governor Trumbull has had installed in the museum room his extensive collection of North American bird’s (sic) eggs.

I discovered this information as I was doing exploratory research on whether or not there was an existing will or contract regarding limits on whether the library may loan, sell, donate or discard the bird egg collection at any time; no such agreement was found. (As an aside, there IS an agreement regarding the library’s Native American artifacts collection; this agreement states that the artifacts collection must remain as part of the library’s collection until the end of time.)

Bird egg collection was a popular gentleman’s hobby in the late 1800s through the early 1900s. This collection contains eggs that Trumbull collected himself, or bought from and/or traded with other egg collectors. Passage of The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, adopted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, exposed some controversial elements regarding this hobby and the practice fell out of favor.

I’ve heard from several Plainville residents who recalled visiting the egg display when they were children, and some who visited later on with their own children. Like many library memories, the bird eggs seem to conjure a sense of nostalgia for some lifelong Plainville residents, while others do not seem to recall their significance. Until the spring of 2010, the entire collection used to be housed and displayed along an entire back wall of the current Youth Services area.

Minutes from the May 11, 2010 meeting of the Library Board of Trustees states the following:

3.         Librarian’s Report

c.         Proposal from Susan Rooney (Head of Children’s and Teen Services at the time) for new slatwall displays. She proposed consolidating the bird eggs and Indian (sic) artifacts into two cases and disposing of the old birds egg (sic) case and two other of the artifacts cases, and to have slatwall installed at a cost not to exceed $1900 to come from the furnishings fund.

            Vinny Sgroi (Library Board member at the time) moved to approve the proposal from Susan Rooney.

            Seconded by Ken Laska (former Board member).

            Vote: Passed unanimously.

The Library section of the Town Annual Report from 2010-2011, authored by Peter Chase (Library Director at the time), states the following:

There were also several improvements in the building. Our new children’s librarian, Susan Rooney, made a new interior plan for the children’s room to emphasize new books and tapes added to the collection. The bird’s egg (sic) and arrow head (sic) collections were moved to another place in the children’s room and displayed in a different case.

Beyond an unsuccessful effort in 2017 to obtain a grant to hire a preservation consultant, and some short-lived efforts of library interns and volunteers, the egg collection was left mostly untouched until the COVID crisis of 2020. With library staff required to report to work and no members of the public allowed in the building, we took this time to address projects that had long been languishing on our to-do lists. Two staff members brought all the eggs out of storage and set about researching and labeling eggs for display, with just the Internet and Trumbull’s original log book as a guide. The eggs were not stored and labeled properly, and staff were left to guess which eggs went together and what bird species they were from. We only had display cases to house just a fraction of the eggs; that being said, we were proud that the rest of the eggs were going back to storage as more properly organized, to the best of the staff’s layman-level knowledge. It should be noted here that archiving and preservation is a very specialized area of library studies that often requires further education and certification beyond the more traditional master’s degree held by public librarians.

In October 2022, I received a phone call from Dr. Kristof Zyskowski, Collections Manager of Vertebrate Zoology, Mammalogy, and Ornithology at Yale Peabody Museum. In his research on a certain bird species in Connecticut, he discovered that the Plainville Library had this collection of bird eggs, one specimen of which matched his bird in question. Dr. Zyskowski did an initial visit to the library to inspect our collection and collect data for his research; he returned a few months later with his supervisor, Head Curator and Professor Dr. Richard Prum. They pointed out some issues, which we added to our own long-standing concerns. These are as follows:

  • Some of the eggs on display were labeled with an incorrect bird species.
  • Some egg “clutches” -- the total eggs a single bird lays per each nesting attempt – were inadvertently and incorrectly broken up and mixed into clutches of other mothers and even other species. The scientists showed us tiny numbers written on each egg, which identifies the clutch and how many eggs exist in the clutch; we did not previously know what those numbers represented. They also showed us that every individual bird egg is like a fingerprint; eggs are printed with “ink” from the mother bird so she can identify and differentiate her eggs from any other mother birds’ eggs in her same species.
  • The display cases we have are inadequate for long-term safety and preservation purposes. Specimens are best kept in temperature-controlled, germ-free environments, in securely locked specialized cases that protect the collection from possible damage from pests, fire, water, vandalism, and theft. Just one of these cases, without temperature control or security, starts at a price of $8500, and we would require at least three to properly display the entire egg collection. Specialized boxes to protect each of the approximately 650 eggs from contamination start at $5 each and go up to $20 each depending on the size of the egg, with a total cost averaging $5200.
  • We have only one of Governor Trumbull’s original log book, which is the only record that properly identifies the eggs, locked in a file cabinet and not protected in the event of fire, flood, vandalism, or theft. There is a second card catalog also in storage that was devised by a former staff librarian in the 1980s.
  • Our bird egg collection is uninsured; its value can only be determined for insurance purposes by oology and ornithology experts. Hiring such an expert as a consultant would require many more thousands of dollars, above and beyond any reoccurring insurance premiums. Beyond that, it is now illegal to sell bird egg collections for profit, which makes determining a monetary insurance value of such a collection difficult.
  • The library does not have official designation as a museum; to obtain such recognition, which would make the library more eligible for grant funding, we would first need to hire a preservation needs consultant to accurately provide cost estimates of equipment and cataloging that meet museum standards for preservation.

Dr. Zyskowski and Dr. Prum expressed their keen interest in acquiring Trumbull’s bird egg collection. They explained how Yale would not only provide one of the most state-of-the-art preservation environments available anywhere in the world, but also that they would add our collection to their digital catalog, making information on these specimens available for free to bird lovers and scientists across the globe. The Yale Peabody digital catalog is open-source, public domain on the Creative Commons platform, which means it can be fully accessed for free by anyone in the world at any time. (Please visit this link to the main page of the ornithology department at Yale, and this link to view an example of an accurate, scientifically correct catalog record for "hummingbird eggs".)

As you may or may not know, scanning and properly digitizing a collection involves much more than just taking photos and posting them online. Inclusion in a scientifically accurate catalog is a very time-consuming and expensive process that requires special knowledge of not only digital archival methods, but also the scientific expertise to identify and label these specimens. The professional expertise of public librarians, nor the budget we have at our disposal, meets the level required to do this collection justice. Furthermore, such a digital catalog would need to be hosted on a widely-used-and-trusted catalog server, which comes with fees.

Library Trustees held several long discussions among themselves to consider both the advantages and disadvantages of donating the collection. Every board member, with the exception of one who was against the idea from the beginning, felt torn between wanting to keep this collection in-house for posterity’s sake, and wanting to contribute to relevant scientific study and worldwide access by working with Yale. Alternative suggestions for the collection were to turn over the bird egg collection to a local Scouts group, or give it to one of the schools as part of a school renovation project.

To help in our decision-making, Dr. Zyskowski and Dr. Prum invited all members of the Library Board and library staff to tour the ornithology research facilities at the Yale Peabody Museum, where we were able to see the breadth and depth of their vast collection. We were impressed with the painstaking organization, cataloging, and germ-free, climate-controlled, fireproof, waterproof, and damage-proof environment where these specimens are housed and studied. We saw bird eggs and bird specimens from every corner of the planet, with rare and extinct varieties among them, and some specimens that are hundreds of years old and in flawless condition. What struck us most was the passion and care these scientists bring to their work, contributing to highly relevant research on evolutionary patterns, ecological conservation, and the effects of climate change, to name a few. The tipping point was knowing that Trumbull’s collection would positively add to this important research, and be digitally accessed by scientists and bird lovers worldwide.

The draft minutes from the May 2023 meeting summarizes public comment on the eggs, as well as final arguments made for both sides of the issue, before the vote was taken. The Trustees voted in favor 4-1 (with one trustee absent but unofficially in favor) to enter into negotiations with Yale Peabody regarding a permanent loan of the collection. “Permanent loan” status means that Yale will return the collection back to the Plainville Public Library if at any time they no longer want it. It also means they are prohibited from ever loaning or donating the collection to a third party. It is important to note that deciding to enter into negotiations does not necessarily mean that this is a done deal; it requires Yale to agree to our terms and conditions, and then requires legal review by the Town Attorney and Yale’s attorney, which can lead to further negotiations. As full disclosure: to date, these negotiations remain far apart on both sides reaching agreement. The reason the Trustees and I have not yet widely released information regarding the potential transfer of bird egg collection is because the nuances of this situation are extremely detailed (as you can see from this annotated report) and we wanted the most concrete and complete information available to share with the public, which includes the exact terms and conditions of any draft contract.

Contrary to speculation on social media, there has been zero effort or motive on the part of either myself or Library Trustees to conduct business “in secret”. Minutes of all meetings of the Library Board of Trustees are kept on file in the local history room of the library for public consumption. We are in the process of adding a Trustee Meeting Agendas & Minutes section to the library website for better accessibility by the public, and we will announce when this is available.

Lastly, it is worth noting that the by-laws of The Plainville Public Library Board of Trustees, established in 1894, provide for governance of the library by the Trustees that is separate and independent from Town governance; thus, Article I of the by-laws state:

The Board of Directors (Board of Trustees) may receive, hold, and manage any devise, bequest, or gift for the establishment, increase, or maintenance of the library.

This is common governance practice for many public libraries, so as to exist and serve beyond the realm of partisan political influence. The Plainville Public Library Board consists of three community members representing the Democratic Party, and three representing the Republican Party.

While public input is always welcome, and Board meetings are always open to the public, it is the elected members of the Library Board who have the final word regarding the fate of any items in the library’s collection. The bird eggs were given specifically to the library, not the Town, and thus remain library property because of the separate governance by-laws that exist. The Library Donations and Gifts Policy goes into further detail regarding library property.

I would like to reiterate that public input is welcome at all meetings. Those who choose to attend the trustees meeting scheduled on Tuesday, June 27th at 6pm are urged to read this report and get an accurate account of what is being considered and why before sharing their thoughts. Should any member of the public wish to receive and view library meeting minutes from the last five years (the full term of my tenure as Director), please email ttomlinson@libraryconnection.info to receive a zip file of those documents on demand. I am also happy to send by-laws and other documents, or answer any questions to the best of my knowledge. Thank you.