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| watercolor sketch, gary.thesix |
An obsessive egg collector was banned from Scotland for life during breeding season for collecting rare bird eggs from nests. The man from East London plead guilty to taking 20 wild bird eggs from Rum island in 2011. In addition to the ban he was ordered to serve two six months jail terms, consecutively. He was caught stealing eggs from the manx shearwater, meadow pipit, and willow warbler. Matthew Gonshaw holds the record in the UK for the most time spent 'inside' for egg collecting. The latest incident was his fifth conviction making him the nation's
most notorious egg thief. Rum is practically uninhabited by humans with a population of just 35 living in 10,000 hectares of mountainous terrain, but it has the world's largest manx shearwater colony. Gonshaw was spotted by an island deer researcher walking into a gull colony and picking up eggs.
