Not on the menu!
Not on the menu!

It’s hard to believe that less than 200 years ago the magnificent great bustard was commonplace around South Dalton.
The world’s heaviest flying bird, the male averages around 90cm to 105cm tall (2ft 10in to 3ft 5in), with a wingspan of between 210cm and 250cm (6ft 10in to 8ft 2in) and can weigh up to 16kg, or around 35lb. The great bustard became extinct in this country in the 1830s, possibly due to its spectacular appearance making it popular as a sporting trophy – on the exhaustingly exhaustive, but excellent, website Victorian Taxidermy www.taxidermy4cash.com/dorman.html, which documents the collection of Thomas Hudson Nelson at the Dorman Museum in Middlesbrough, can be found heartbreaking accounts of communities of bustards wiped out for sport. 

Cooked for supper 
A Mr WH St Quintin, in an account from 4 March 1902, says: “In the churchyard at Lowthorpe is buried Agars, for some time keeper in our family [who] once killed 11 great Bustards at a shot on the Wolds.” 
And a Mr Hebden recalled that in about 1811 he saw ‘five large Bustards on Flixton Wold, that number continuing there at least two years, when two were killed; the remaining three still continued on the same Wold for at least one year, when two disappeared, leaving the solitary bird, which, after a length of time, was severely wounded by Sir William Strickland's keeper, and found some days afterwards in a turnip field near Hunmanby, by the huntsman of the Scarborough Harriers, and secured’. Mr AS Bell adds that this poor bird ‘was brought to Scarborough and cooked at a supper given by the hunt’.
The site also tells us that ‘the last Bustards which frequented the southern portion of the Wolds were in the vicinity of North and South Dalton. There is an egg, the only Yorkshire one known to exist, in the Scarborough Museum, the note attached to which states it was found by James Dowker of North Dalton, in the East Riding, in 1810… in 1816 or 1817 James Dowker killed two Bustards near North Dalton, with a right and left shot.’ If, however, you’d prefer to see the live version in the wild, The Great Bustard Group (www.greatbustard. org) is attempting to establish a self-sustaining population of great bustards in Wiltshire and create practical conservation measures for the birds in Russia, from where it sources birds for the UK project. But even if the Group succeeds in its aim – James promises faithfully that great bustard will never, ever turn up on the menu at the Pipe and Glass. 

Reintroduction programme 
The bird in our picture, now in the taxidermy section of the Scarborough Collections at Scarborough Museums Trust, was shot near Foxholes in 1819. 

If, however, you’d prefer to see the live version in the wild, The Great Bustard Group (www.greatbustard.org) is attempting to establish a self-sustaining population of great bustards in Wiltshire and create practical conservation measures for the birds in Russia, from where it sources birds for the UK project. But even if the Group succeeds in its aim – James promises faithfully that great bustard will never, ever turn up on the menu at the Pipe and Glass. 


PUBLISHED :April 2013
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