Colin Watson (egg collector)

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Colin Watson (1952-2006) was a British egg collector who stole the eggs of rare and wild birds from protected wildlife sites throughout Great Britain for over twenty years before his death. Despite six prior convictions and issued fines in thousands of pounds, he amassed the largest egg collection in the country before being confiscated by agents of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds during a raid on his home in 1985 (which numbered over 2,000 eggs, many of which included golden eagles and ospreys). However, while successfully appealing his charge of illegal possession in April 1985, claiming he had collected his eggs before the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 with the exception of 16, he was issued a £2,800 fine for his later raids.

Although family and friends claimed he had retired from bird collecting during the early 1990s, he remained on several informal lists maintained by the RSPB and other organizations of around 300 known or suspected egg collectors (whose cars are logged if they go near the nesting sites of rare birds), he was later accused of the vandalism of the osprey nesting tree in Loch Garten, Scotland in 1986, when an unidentified person attempted to cut down the nesting tree with a chainsaw.

He eventually died after falling 12-metres (40 feet) from a larch tree he was climbing to observe the nest of a protected species in South Yorkshire. Although he remained alive shortly after his fall, he died before the arrival of paramedics and was officially pronounced dead on the scene.