Uncle Hanni's Eggs

More than 5,000 hand-painted eggs were a labor of love

By Pat Leonard

Johannes Paulsen with the wooden eggs he painted on the island of Sylt, Germany.

Courtesy of Ingrid Draper

Johannes Paulsen made beautiful, lifelike bird eggs out of wood. His work fills 43 wooden crates 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 on April 7, 1909, and lived most of his life on the North Sea island of Sylt, Germany. 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.

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. During 1948–1952, Paulsen maintained the Kampen bird sanctuary, where he decided he would do something to thwart egg-collecting hobbyists, fearing the island's bird population would be decimated.

Paulsen's first set of wooden eggs grew to 1,500 eggs representing nearly 300 European species. Newspapers at the time reported that 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 of Ornithology praise the collection for its beauty and educational value.

Johannes Paulsen hand-painted these wooden eggs to resemble those of a Spruce Grouse.

Susan E. Spear

At the invitation of American zoologists, Paulsen came to the United States in 1959 to create a collection of wooden eggs for North American birds. 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 and scientific name. The lid of each heavy case has a framed print by John James Audubon showing the birds whose eggs are represented.

Johannes Paulsen died in 1975. For the next 16 years, his massive egg collection languished in the back room of a family grocery store in Brooklyn. In 1999, at the request of Paulsen's great-niece Yasmin, staff from the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates drove 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."

Northern Cardinal eggs by Susan E. Spear

Paulsen's nieces and nephews affectionately call him "Uncle Hanni" and remember his interest in painting and astronomy, his adoration of dogs, his love of telling 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.

Help make it possible to display Uncle Hanni's wooden egg collection to the tens of thousands of visitors who come to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. We are seeking a special gift of $9,000 to create four display cases, enabling us to rotate all 43 cases of eggs through an ongoing exhibit in the visitors' center. Please contact Scott Sutcliffe at (607) 254-2424.

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu