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Status: Indexed

Collector: Grinnell-1925
Location: San Diego
Date: June 17, 1925
Page Number: 2456

11 a.m. - Went to dinner last evening with the Griffing
Bancroft
s - Mr. and Mrs., and his son Griffing. All
are ardent collectors of birds eggs, and, being well-to-do,
their collection is large and growing amazingly.
Mr. Bancroft collects, and hires collectors, and buys eggs.
He showed me two each of Bald Eagle taken this year
on Catalina and San Clemente islands, several
sets of Golden Eagle, etc., etc. He has bought the balance
of the Walter E. Bryant eggs from H. F. Duprey, with
some Guadalupe Island things among them; the old
collection of "Parkhurst" of San Jose, containing White
Tailed Kite
s, etc., etc. I regret to say that
Bancroft is very unscientific in all his methods:
He fails to put any sort of numbers on the eggs - of the same
or of different sets - he merely puts a "floating" number
(tagged on a slip of paper) on the cotton drawer-lining at
the side of each set - the number referring to an entry
in a catalog where presumably all the data is
kept. His identifications are dubious in some
cases - he looks for differences in the eggs of related
subspecies - and identifies subspecies by the eggs (a la
Dawson!). As I said, he buys wholesale, often
from boys and from fishermen, identifying the eggs by
appearance - and he doesn't know the birds themselves.
But he has great energy and ingenuity in ransacking
the country for rarities - quantity, too, he wants. I
doubt if he respects 'limits' of his permits! I
wish his objectives could be modified a bit.

Notes and Questions

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nbahet

As per usual, I'm putting (?) marks where I'm mildly unsure of my transcription. I'm going to stop pointing this out in the notes.