Self-taught oologists

I have been having a funny egg-related correspondence with my friend Wendy over the last few days. It is enmeshed in a series of other e-mails that are on the whole non-reproducible here, but it was spurred by a funny message from my mother, to whom I had recounted another friend's description of herself running up the hills of Prospect Park with her two twin babies in the jogging stroller and feeling like Sisyphus. . .

This is late summer or fall of 1973, in London (I was born in July 1971, my twin brothers in June 1973):

I see myself pushing the big pram up Muswell Hill with the three of you in it; then doing the Supermarket shopping and landing up with a case of canned baby formula tucked in the luggage rack under the body of the pram, and you beside me as we race down the hill trying to stop the pram from running away from us it is by now so heavy!!

I also see us at the bottom of the hill in the little shopping center, where the babes are snoozing in the pram at one end like sardines, and you and the shopping tucked in side by side at the other end, and as I pay for some veg you are opening the box of eggs and handing a single egg graciously to the lady behind us in the queue!!

All of this is a long preamble for a piece that caught my eye in the Yale alumni magazine--it's not available online, but it seemed worth scanning in for the enjoyment of oologists everywhere. Here's a related link, and here's the Amazon link for Carrol L. Henderon's wonderfully titled Oology and Ralph's Talking Eggs: Bird Conservation Comes Out of Its Shell (hmmm, reminds me of childhood favorite Meg's Eggs!). It might be worth a quick visit to the Peabody Museum next time I find myself passing through New Haven...