Bridges of Eggs from Peru to SF

Puente de Piedra, Lima, Peru. photo from creative commons.

In 1608, the architect Juan del Corral designed and built a bridge over the Rio Rimac, connecting Lima to the district of San Lazaro. The bridge is still standing today. This is cool just based on time itself. Cool that a bridge can be built of stone and still be standing, still be being traveled upon over 400 years later. What is even cooler is that the mortar for the bridge was mixed not with water, but with an estimated 10,000 egg whites. Not chicken eggs, sea bird eggs. People went out on cliffs and to islands, harvested ten thousand sea bird eggs with the intent of mixing mortar for a bridge. Though officially the Bridge of Stones (Puente de Piedra) it is sometimes referred to as the Bridge of Eggs.

In the 1840s & 50s, a man named Doc Robinson decided that the Farallones Islands, located 27 miles off of the coast of San Francisco, were the perfect spot to harvest bird eggs. San Francisco grew in leaps and bounds during the Gold Rush years - years in which eggs were scarce. Folks got to the golden coast either by taking a boat all of the way around South America, or overland. In both cases, any chickens would be eaten long before San Francisco showed on the horizon. Shortages lead to high prices. One chicken egg sold for $1 each - the equivalent of thirty dollars in 2019 money.

Doc Robinson and his hired men would take a small (less than 20 ft) boat across the choppy, shark-infested waters, to the Farallones. There are no beaches on all but one of the jagged rocks, just smaller rocks to haul the boat up on to. Then they would scale the cliffs to pull eggs from the nests of Common Murres, Urea aalge.

my quick sketch of Common Murres, both in and out of the water.

Goofy-looking, penguin-shaped birds, the Common Murre always seems to need to run across the surface of the water before their small wings achieve enough lift to pull them from the ocean waves. Their eggs are blue with yolks twice the size of chicken eggs - and also fiery red in color. The bird numbered in the hundreds of thousands before Robinson's enterprise led to the near-mythic San Francisco Egg Wars. Italian eggers headed out to the "Islands of the Dead" to cash in on the Egg Rush. Robinson's hired men held them off of the beach with guns. Men died, fortunes were made, and the legends became the stuff of comic books (literally - check out this out: https://sfnhs.com/2011/08/31/eggs-and-more/)

a pile of stolen eggs waiting to be loaded on the boat. Despite the fact that the rough seas caused the eggers to lose as much as half of their plunder during every trip back to the mainland, they kept at it.  Photo by Arthur Bolten.

It was not uncommon for eggers to fall to their death from the cliffs. Common Murre populations plummeted to less than 30K. The western faction of the Audubon Society was founded to help these sea footballs, pushing through a government mandate in 1881 prohibiting further egging on the islands. It still happened for years after. The Nature Conservancy estimates that murre populations only really began to recover in the last decades of the 20th century.

I keep trying to picture going to the equivalent of a diner in Gold Rush San Francisco and being served a plate of pink scrambled eggs. If Clark Gable & Jeanette MacDonald's 1936 film San Francisco (set during 1906) had been filmed in color, would anyone have gotten the egg color detail correct? A pink Hangtown Omelet* anyone? (*eggs, bacon & oysters).

References:
Bridge of Eggs https://hruk.biz/bridge-of-eggs-in-peru/
http://www.augnet.org/en/history/places/4205-ecuador-quito/
Gold Rush Satirist https://www.sfchronicle.com/chronicle_vault/article/Gold-Rush-satirist-impresario-and-Farallones-13509804.php 
High Egg Prices http://time.com/4149595/farallon-egg-wars/
Girabaldi and the Farallon Egg War http://faralloneggwar.blogspot.com/
San Francisco's Egg Basket http://faralloneggwar.blogspot.com/