CAMARILLO : Foundation Moves Bird Egg Collection to New Site

Gigantic Elephantbird eggs as big as watermelons are among the 800,000 bird eggs collected by the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, which is moving from Los Angeles to a new research center in Camarillo.

The bird egg collection, the largest in the world, will be joined by 16,000 bird nests and 48,000 stuffed birds at the center’s new home at 439 Calle San Pablo.

“We’ve collected collections from all over the world,” said Lloyd Kiff, the center’s director. Kiff also led the California Condor Recovery Team that helped capture the endangered birds for breeding and eventual release.

Kiff has been director of the center since it opened in 1956. The collections were being housed at several Los Angeles locations.

The move to Camarillo is in progress and won’t be completed until summer, he said. The center will be used mainly by researchers who also glean information from the thousands of bird books and photographs in the collection, but the public will have limited access as well.

“The public can come in and visit by appointment,” Kiff said. Groups such as the Scouts would be welcome for arranged tours, he said.

The Elephantbird eggs are among the most bizarre items in the collection, he said. Before the birds became extinct 300 years ago, they lived on the island of Madagascar, where they grew as tall as 12 feet and weighed up to a ton, Kiff said.

“The eggs are bigger than dinosaur eggs,” he said. They are not a particularly rare find because their hard shells made them durable.

By contrast, the collection also includes the eggs of the dwarf hummingbird. Regular hummingbirds lay pea-sized eggs. The dwarf eggs are produced without yolks and are one-third that size, he said.

Most of the eggshells in the collection are whole. The insides have been expelled by forcing air through small holes. But the center also collects eggshells to study the effects of the insecticide DDT. Similar analyses are also done on the condor eggs.

Kiff said the center had hoped to join its collection with that of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and house them in one location.

“We all tried very hard, but we just couldn’t pull it off,” he said.