By Pat Leonard

Johannes Paulsen made beautiful, lifelike bird eggs out of wood. His work fills 43 handmade wooden cases stored at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. He hand-painted more than 5,100 eggs in 1,100 clutches, representing the eggs of hundreds of species of North American birds.

Paulsen was born April 7, 1909, and lived most of his life on the North Sea island of Sylt (pronounced “Zoolt”) 13 miles off the coast. The island is a fragile strip of sand and rock, 25 miles long—a medley of dunes, white sand beaches, mudflats, meadows, and salt marshes. More than a million people vacation there each year, earning it the title “the Martha’s Vineyard of Europe.”

         Island of Sylt, photos by Beate Zoellner, www.beates-bunte-bilder.de

Johannes Paulsen did not have any formal education in ornithology or in art. He worked first as a baker, then a fireman, before being called to serve in the military in 1941. From 1948-1952, Paulsen maintained the Kampen bird sanctuary, where he decided he would do something to thwart the egg collectors, fearing the island’s bird population would be decimated. Egg-collecting was a passionate hobby for many young people and it is a fascination that continues even today, though the practice is illegal in most countries.

Johannes Paulsen with the Sylt eggs. Photo courtesy of Ingrid Draper

Paulsen’s first set of wooden eggs grew to 1,500 individual eggs representing nearly 300 European species. Newspapers at the time reported Paulsen would first draw and measure real eggs in the field, taking care not to disturb the nest. Sometimes that meant climbing a tree, scaling a cliff, or slogging through the marshes. He would send the dimensions, measured to within a tenth of a millimeter, to a Sylt woodworker who would turn out the blank wooden eggs on a lathe. Paulsen would return to the nest and paint the true-to-life colors and patterns. The Kampen sanctuary museum displayed all these eggs in 1953.  Sixty thousand people visited the museum in 1959. No one knows what happened to the European wooden egg collection. Testimonial letters on file at the Lab praise the collection for its beauty and its educational value.

German newspaper images

A 1955 German newspaper article says Paulsen was invited to the United States by Brooklyn University and visiting American zoologists who were impressed with his work and wanted him to create a collection of wooden eggs for North American birds.  He left Germany for New York on September 24, 1959. Paulsen spent five years creating the North American egg collection. Each egg is anchored with wire and every clutch is tagged with the bird’s common English name and its scientific Latin name. Built into the lid of each heavy case are framed Audubon prints of birds whose eggs are shown.

Both the eggs and the wooden cases were meticulously crafted. Photo by Susan Spear

Johannes Paulsen died in 1975 and for the next 16 years his massive egg collection languished in a back room of a family grocery store in Brooklyn. Then the store was sold in 1991 and the eggs had to be moved. Paulsen’s great-niece Yasmin called the Lab of Ornithology and staff from the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates drove down to Brooklyn to collect the wooden eggs. “If my grandmother were here, it would mean a great deal to her,” Yasmin says. “I know she was very pleased when we were able to donate the eggs to the university because my great uncle put so much of himself into that.”

Photo by Susan Spear

Paulsen never married and never returned to Sylt. His nieces and nephews in America and back in Germany affectionately call him "Uncle Hanni" and remember his interest in painting and astronomy, how he adored his dogs, how he loved to tell jokes, and his skill on several musical instruments.  Johannes Paulsen loved birds and wanted to protect them. It seems fitting, then, that his work should find a home here at the Lab of Ornithology where it may yet be used to fulfill the dreams of this gentle artist and nature-lover from a windswept North Sea island.

    Photo by Susan Spear