Great Bustards

In Norwich Castle Museum there is a room full of mounted bird skins. In this room there is a large glass case, and in this case are contained the skins of a drove of 7 Great Bustards. The last of the species to have ever walked on the sandy soils of the Norfolk Brecks. As schoolboys, my friend and I would quite often spend a few minutes between changing buses in this wonderful room, where after divesting ourselves of our satchels and coats, we would ogle the exotic looking birds. We stood in awe of the huge wingspan of a White-tailed Eagle, marvelled at the vibrantly coloured Bee-eaters and were transfixed, of course, by the bustards, those huge turkey-sized birds that were totally outside our experience yet somehow held a link with our county’s past. They told tales of a long-ago world, which to our young imaginations seemed quite romantic; we failed to comprehend the true significance of the contents of this unassuming glass case, for truth is it represents a cruel and very distasteful aspect of our past relationship with the natural world.

Scroll forward 50 years (how can that be?) and if you visited Norwich Castle today you too would be able to gaze at the bustards posed in stately fashion surveying, we can easily imagine, their domain of wide-open grassland heath extending far to the horizon beneath endless Norfolk skies. You may idly wonder why these majestic birds were taken from their realm, shot from the unpolluted skies they called their own, blasted from those skies like some worthless chattel to end up displayed as a vanity project to satisfy the blood lust of some Victorian academic. Of course, you could also speculate that it hardly mattered, because a few decades after these beauties were exterminated their habitat was also largely destroyed, but that doesn’t excuse the recklessness, the bloody-minded thoughtlessness, which resulted in the local extinction of such a magnificent species.

By sheer chance I can shed some light on this episode. I sometimes sift through the literary gems that adorn the shelves of the City Bookshop, a mere stone’s throw from the glass case aforementioned. A couple of years ago, there amongst a box of local publications, I stumbled upon a copy of the Transactions of the Norfolk & Norwich Naturalists’ Society for the years 1884-85. Irresistible. I initially baulked at the price tag of £12.50, until I found within the worn pages an account of the life of a certain Dr John Scales who had then recently deceased. Never heard of him, but amazingly there was an original signed photograph of the bewhiskered gentlemen as a frontispiece to the article. That alone began to sway the balance, and then the clincher: a series of letters giving a blow-by-blow account of how, why, where and when the last of the Norfolk Great Bustards were shot and ended up in the Norwich Castle collection. My wallet opened itself and within seconds I was the proud owner of a publication, which when read, engendered feelings of disgust and amazement in equal measure. The text prompted much head shaking because the frank openness of tales of slaughter are delivered as matter of fact and simply a way of life….or rather death. We can now find the story behind the destruction of the last Norfolk bustard flock. It’s probably best that I simply reproduce the relevant sections here, taking the form of an exchange of correspondence. Think of it what you will, bearing in mind this was a publication of a naturalists’ society littered with other accounts of shootings and senseless murder of wild creatures.

So much then for the Norfolk birds, sadly not an isolated episode, for across the country others were persecuted to extinction, with the last being killed during the 1830s.

Nearly two centuries passed before concerted efforts have been made to restore this magnificent animal to the British avifauna. Under the auspices of the Great Bustard Group, birds have been released onto Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire where they now thrive. Between 2004 and 2019 birds and eggs from Russia (rescued from agricultural activity) and latterly Spanish populations have been reared and released on Salisbury Plain resulting in a self-sustaining breeding population of about 100 birds. The move from Russian sourced birds to Spain is a result of discovering that the Russian Great Bustards have a much stronger tendency to migrate, whereas the Spanish birds are more sedentary. Also, the birds from Spain, where they have a slowly increasing population, are more genetically similar to the original British birds.

We visited the area recently, booking a 2-hour tour with a guide, Charles Hibberd, who was superb. Not only did we have excellent views of a drove of 20 birds, but we discovered so much about their ecology, habits and ongoing conservation thanks to Charles’s knowledge and enthusiasm. I cannot recommend the tour highly enough. You can find details of that excursion and others on offer here.