Walter Raine was born in Leeds, England, on 15 September 1861.
He and his wife emigrated to Toronto, Ontario in 1884 and he worked as a lithographic engraver and watercolor artist, for Hough and Harris Co. and later for Howell.
His obsessive life-long hobby and after-hours business was oology. He bought and sold birds’ eggs from his home when egg collecting was a more flourishing hobby than stamp collecting and indeed he had one of the largest such businesses in North America. At one time, Raine’s collection of 50,000 eggs was the largest in Canada. (The Blue Jay, 1981)
Raine was a prodigious collector and dealer in birds’ eggs, but some of his identifications were considered unreliable and his reputation suffered.
(Revisiting the historical nesting record of the Whooping Crane at Battleford, Saskatchewan by Spencer G. Sealy, Department of Biological Sciences)
Walter wrote an article for the Hawkeye Ornithologist and Oologist in 1888 about the Skylark. Perhaps, it describes the time in which the displayed eggs were collected.(H.O.O. 1888 V.1, No.4, pg.55)
Walter died in Toronto, Canada on July 26, 1934.
There are 40 egg sets from Walter Raine in the Pember’s collection.
