Cultureshock

You need Adobe Flash installed to watch this movie.
Get Adobe Flash

Video transcript

A long, long time ago my friend and I used to go out and collect birds’ eggs. We started off with all the common local birds - black bird, a thrush, sparrows, pigeons and of course one we all have, the chickens. My dad used to mess about with wood in his spare time so he made us three rectangular boxes which lay on top of each other. They were for our small eggs. For our bigger eggs we had an old wooden bread basket. We filled these with sawdust from my dad’s garage floor.

So that was it, my friend and I were off, climbing trees like the two little monkeys we were. Collecting eggs was what took us all over the place, we were out the house early doors, on our bikes or we would but an explorer ticket so we could go further. One day it my turn to go up this tree to check a nest out. Now this was a big tree, not just big, it was big big. Up I went, keen as mustard, I got up there no problem. I was over the moon, a magpie had took this nest over. Four eggs sitting neatly in the bottom. I shouted down to my friend to tell him. I started laughing as way down I could just make out this small skinny blond lad dancing with joy. I popped one egg in my mouth and started my descent. I was just under half way down and I was stuck, I couldn’t believe it. My friend had to talk me down. A tree which had taken me minutes to get up took me about half an hour to get down.

On another day we were at the woods having a kick about with the football. As we were having a rest we seen a kingfisher flying to some foliage on the riverbank. We went to inspect and after rummaging around for a few minutes we stumbled across our prize. To this day it is still my favourite, a perfectly round, white glossy egg. We were very proud of our birds of prey eggs – kestrel, osprey to name a couple but this one was special for me. I didn’t know anyone who had had this egg. To me it was as beautiful and perfect as the bird which had laid it.