Egg Fever, Remembered as a Bloody Battle for Bird Nests (12 photos)
During the California Gold Rush of the 1850s, another, no less brutal battle unfolded. 
Its goal wasn't the glitter of gold, but fragile bird eggs, which had become a priceless commodity. People were even willing to kill for them. 
San Francisco, overwhelmed by a wave of 300,000 gold prospectors, was suffocating from hunger. When chicken eggs became a luxury, eyes turned to the Farallon Islands. 
Just 50 kilometers off the coast, these cliffs were home to millions of seabird colonies. It was the murre eggs that sparked the war. 
These birds laid large, colorful eggs with strong shells. History has it that the enterprising Dr. Robinson, rushing after this treasure, made a fortune selling each egg for a dollar. 
Fried murre eggs looked unappealing: the whites remained translucent and gelatinous, and the taste was fishy. But for the prospectors, driven mad by protein hunger, this mattered not. 
Adventurers flocked to the islands. Risking their lives, they climbed sheer cliffs, fending off seagulls, to collect hundreds of thousands of eggs. To ensure freshness, they methodically destroyed every clutch, returning the next day for more. 
The climax came in June 1863. Competing companies, the Pacific Company and a group of Italian fishermen, clashed in a shootout. Shots rang out, killing two and wounding several. 
The authorities, seeking to stop the chaos, granted a monopoly on egg collection to the Pacific Company. Over the next twenty years, the predatory egg harvesting almost completely wiped out the murre population, reducing it from half a million pairs to a measly six thousand. 
It wasn't until 1881 that the slaughter ceased. Today, the Farallon Islands' natural environment is slowly healing, and its bird population is slowly but surely returning to its former glory. 
