Layings from V.V. Leonovich's collection The earliest well documented bird eggs in the collection of Division of Ornithology

There are special kinds of bird collections kept in the museums, namely those of eggs and nests, or oological and nidological collections, respectively.

Single eggs and layings, as well as nests seem to have been brought to the Museum since the beginning of XIX century. Thus, eggs and nests of humming-birds and some eggs of cassowary, African ostrich donated by members of Demidoff's family were listed in reports of the Cabinet of Natural History in the 1830s. It is possible that the humming-bird nest displayed in modern museum exhibition belonged to that old collection.

Unfortunately, there were no special documentation and storage forms developed especially for this type of collection for nearly a hundred years. Therefore, mainly disembodied eggs remained from earlier donations which are of just limited scientific value. The oldest quite precisely dated eggs kept here are those of domestic sparrow, white wagtail and several others collected by. I.S. Ostroukhov in Guriev in 1854-1855.

A practice of combined collecting of nests or nest materials with layings, which is peculiar for Russian ornithology, began in the 1930s. E.P. Spangenberg was the first to collect them, but it was A.P. Kuzyakin who developed and propagated quite actively this kind of ornithological collections. Such combined collecting and storage is much more informative as it demonstrates correspondence between egg coloration and nest materials.

In the 1950-1960s, private collections of eggs and nests became numerous, but the one of this Museum remained scanty. It actually began with V.E. Flint's collection of 760 layings donated to the Museum in 1970 when he became a member of the Museum staff. After that, many important collections came to the Museum from various persons, but most numerous was that of V.V. Leonovich which included more than 2.000 layings.