Well, a robber of bird's eggs, and the penitent is Bill Oddie, whose programmes on birding or birdwatching are well known on the BBC. He has also just published a book on the birds of Britain and Ireland. It was a long time ago, when he was a young lad (girls didn't go in for it at all), and while he regrets his "life of crime", he argues or concedes, that among his generation it was a popular occupation, and, as further mitigation tells us that if he hadn't been a bird-nest-robber, he doubts very much if he would have become a civilised bird-watcher. He knows this isn't justification.
He came from Rochdale in Lancashire, a terrace "in Sparthbottom's Road (by 'eck they don't name 'em like that any more)". Putting the case against taking the eggs of wild birds, he makes the point that today's collectors are obsessed with rarities and therefore logically "it is almost in their interests to reduce a species to extinction; the last egg would be the most valuable". Thus we often read of a watch being kept, day and night, on the nest of a rare bird in a remote place.
Today those with an interest in birds can see wonderful films on their TV screens. Cameras with telephoto or zoom lenses are available to many. And, anyway, young people have more ways of spending their time, tinkering with electronics, playing sports etc. And, of course, egg robbing is illegal.
But Oddie won't forget how much he learned in the course of his "life of crime". Such as the variety of materials the birds use in building their nests, and their ingenuity. He could recognise the species, even if there was no bird nearby and no eggs to take. "I close my eyes and still see my first chaffinch's nest, made from soft, grey-green moss or lichen, so that it looked as if it had grown almost naturally from within the fork of the tree". And how apparently similar nests could be distinguished by their different linings: blackbirds use grass lining, song thrushes use mud. And so on to how moorhens nests differ from those of coots.
Spotted flycatchers, he writes, (this is all from BBC Wildlife magazine for June) would almost certainly build in an old ivy-covered wall. (A flycatcher near a river in Meath built more than once in a honeysuckle over the front door of a cottage, not in the least disturbed by comings and goings.) Anyway, Oddie drives home the lesson in capital letters EGG COLLECTING IS WRONG. He makes amends for his past misdeeds by his fine programmes.