A New Zealand Icon

Worcester City’s collection has examples of several bird specimens from New Zealand. These were collected and preserved by collectors in the nineteenth century, and brought to Worcester Museum as a centre of Natural History research and learning. Some of these species are now extinct. This one, the kiwi, has become synonymous with New Zealand and is considered a vulnerable species.

The kiwi is a little nocturnal, flightless bird, its habitat commonly being native and exotic forests, scrub and rough farmland in Northland and some of its offshore islands.

When the settlers arrived in New Zealand, they brought with them stoats, ferrets and rats. These have had a devastating impact on the population of the kiwi. A conservation programme is in place to assist in maintaining the species, with five kiwi sanctuary areas across the country.

The Great Bustard

These specimens came to the City museum in the late 19th century when mounted Great Bustards were a desirable hunting trophy.

The male Great Bustard is typically 100cm high and can weigh up to 14kg, making them one of the heaviest flying birds. As seen with these two museum specimens, the male is about a third larger than the female – this difference between the sexes is wider in the Great Bustard than in almost all other species.

The Great Bustard became extinct in Great Britain in 1832. This was partially due to overzealous hunting, but also the destruction of its natural habitat after the 1800 Enclosures Act which allowed open areas of common land to be divided into smaller fields. Great Bustards are ground nesting and will sit on the nest for more than twenty days. They prefer the undisturbed shelter of wild mixed crops and open uncultivated grassland, which also supports the varied omnivore diet of the birds. Given their size, it’s not surprising that they prefer to walk than fly – and when it needs to a female Great Bustard can outrun a fox.

Approximately 31,000 Great Bustards still exist in the wild across the world, with robust populations in Spain and Portugal. In 2004 The Great Bustard Group began bringing eggs to the UK from Russia and Spain, rearing chicks to be released on Salisbury Plain, where they are relatively undisturbed by agriculture. Since then, they have managed to successfully establish a new population of about 100 birds in Great Britain.

First Sighting

Like the Red Fescue Grass, this herbarium specimen tracks the progress of a now common plant as it moves into Worcestershire habitats. In this case we actually have two specimens displayed together, collected by the Worcestershire Natural History Society over the space of 15 years.

The plant on the left was collected by Robert Streeton from the banks of Kempsey Brook in October 1830, and is thought to be the first record of this plant in Worcestershire. The plant on the right was collected by George Reece, the City Museum’s Curator, at Knapps Brickground on 24th May 1845.

Marsh Ragwort is now a common and widespread plant, growing along riverbanks and ditches. From June to August, Marsh Ragwort produces yellow flowers that are up to 25 mm in diameter.

Marsh Ragwort contains Pyrrolizidine Alkaloids, which makes it taste bitter. This bitterness deters animals from eating it, but the alkaloids make Marsh Ragwort poisonous to humans and animals. If ingested, the poisons cause irreversible liver damage. For this reason, local people will have been carefully watching the plant spread.

The scientific name, or two-part Latin binomial, for the Marsh Ragwort is Senecio aquaticus. ‘Aquaticus’ means aquatic, or that it lives in or near fresh water.

This research was originally compiled by staff at Thinktank, as part of their Exploring the Natural World digitisation project including museum collections from across the West Midlands.

Remains of the Giant Moa

The Moa was a huge flightless bird of New Zealand which is now extinct. There were nine species with the largest one being over 3.5 metres tall and weighing 230 kilograms (nearly forty stone, about the weight of a cow). They had no wings at all, unlike other flightless birds.

It’s thought there may have been over 2 million moas on the islands before they were colonised by man. They were the largest land animal and their only predators being the biggest bird of prey. This meant they were unprepared to survive human activity and they were hunted to extinction within 200 years of human habitation on New Zealand. We believe the last one disappeared before the sixteenth century, although there were a few stories of European settlers spotting massive birds in the 1800s. The species record survived in rock drawings, in oral tradition, fossilised footprints and in their surviving bones.

Several samples of the bones were sent back to England, resulting in much curiosity. Richard Owen, the foremost authority on fossilised anatomy of the time, was sent part of a thigh bone in 1839. At the time Owen was professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, but would go on spearhead the creation of the Natural History Museum and the transfer of the dinosaur collections there from the British Museum. After four years examining it, he declared that the large but light bone he had been sent must be from a large extinct bird, shaped a little like an ostrich.

The collectors of the Worcestershire Natural History Society, the founders of the Worcester Museum, were particularly interested in birds, and fascinated by species from Australia and New Zealand. It was said that in 1845 Worcester had one of the best bird collections outside of London with some species “new to science” and we believe that these bones of the Moa in the collection were probably donated by a Mr Hughes at around this time. We know that Richard Owen visited Worcester’s collection and described some of the specimens in 1859.

Betel Chewer’s Basket

This basket has been in the City’s collection for over a century and at some point became adrift from its documentation. It’s been important to try and discover its story.

We believe it to be a betel chewer’s bag. It looks much like examples found in the Museum of New Zealand’s vast collections. It is possible that the basket, which came from Milne Bay in Papua New Guinea, may have been associated with Robert Gale. Gale served aboard HMS Rattlesnake in a naval scientific expedition which set out in 1846 to chart the Great Barrier Reef around Australia.

The bulk of the objects from the Rattlesnake expedition were gifted to the British Museum by the captain, Owen Stanley. Some of Stanley’s objects were also from Milne Bay, though Robert Gale kept a few objects that he collected himself. When Gale returned to England, he settled in Malvern and donated his collection to Worcestershire Natural History Society, which later became Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum.

The betel nut – known as Buai – is a seed from the Areca palm. When chewed, it is highly addictive, like nicotine. The main ingredient arecoline keeps the person alert and gives them a euphoric feeling; however, it is also carcinogenic, and Papua New Guinea has the highest rate of mouth cancers in the world. The tell-tale sign of a betel chewer is red lips and teeth. The chewing of the nut is a widespread tradition across Southeast Asia, parts of the Pacific, Taiwan, parts of China, the Caribbean, Maldives and Madagascar. The religious and cultural meanings of chewing the nut in some of these areas makes it difficult to stop, despite the health impact.

The Rowan Tree

This is an example of Sorbus Aucuparia, commonly known as Mountain Ash or Rowan, and is one of thousands of specimens that form the Worcester City herbarium collection. The collection consists predominantly of local and native British specimens, gathered, preserved and exchanged between enthusiastic collectors throughout the nineteenth century.

The old Celtic name for Rowan, ‘fid na ndruad’, means wizards’ tree, and in fact, Rowan has a long tradition of being used as a protection against witches. Red was considered to be the best colour for fighting evil, and so the Rowan’s bright red berries were seen as a tool for keeping witches and evil spirits at bay. In Ireland, it was planted near houses to protect them against spirits, Rowan trees were planted in churchyards in Wales, and cutting the tree down was considered taboo in Scotland. The wood was used for stirring milk to prevent curdling, as a pocket charm against rheumatism, and also as divining rods.

Rowan is most often found in the north and the west of the UK. Its leaves are enjoyed by the caterpillars of several moths, including the larger Welsh wave and autumn green carpet. Caterpillars of the apple fruit moth feed on the berries. Whilst the flowers provide pollen and nectar for bees and other pollinating insects, Rowan berries are a nutrient rich source of food for birds in autumn, especially the blackbird, mistle thrush, redstart, redwing, song thrush, fieldfare and waxwing.

The Early Worcester Museum

The Museum in the City of Worcester is one of the oldest in the British Isles, tracing its history back to 1833.

On the 8th April in that year a local physician, Dr Charles Hastings (later to become Sir Charles Hastings, founder of the British Medical Association) chaired an inaugural meeting of Worcester’s Natural History Society at the City’s Guildhall. Hastings’ enthusiasm led to his playing a prominent part in the establishment of the Society’s museum.

Premises in Angel Street, recently vacated by the library, were secured and a natural history museum was established. Objects came flooding in and opening hours between 11.00—5.00 on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays allowed the public to see the collection. The original admission charge was one shilling.

By 1835 the collection had become too large for the building holding it and so the sum of £6,000 was raised to provide the city’s first purpose–built museum in Foregate Street, pictured here in this engraving in Worcester’s collection, on the site of the present Odeon Cinema. It was officially opened by Charles Hastings on the 15th September, 1837 and became known as The Museum of the Worcestershire Natural History Society.

The Museum flourished during the 1840s and 1850s when it reached the height of its popularity and fame. Famous visitors included John Gould, Charles Leyll and Roderick Murchison but by the 1860s many of its founders members had died, including Sir Charles Hastings. Interest waned and funding difficulties arose causing the collection to suffer.

Help was at hand when after much debate, Worcester City Council decided to adopt the Public Libraries Act of in 1879. The Council’s Libraries Committee offered to purchase the museum building and its contents at a cost of £2,820 (which included donations of £500 for each from local benefactors Thomas Rowley Hill, J D Perrins and Charles Wheeley Lea).
A condition of sale was that George Reece was to be retained as Curator and that the new institution was to be called The Worcester Public Library and Hastings Museum. These conditions were fulfilled and the building was reopened in its new guise on the 16th of March 1881.

The Hasting Museum & Public Library remained there until the mid-1890s when it was transferred to its new and current home in the Victoria Institute.

The great outdoors, indoors

Museums Worcestershire’s origins lie with the Worcestershire Natural History Society who set up Worcester’s first Museum. On 8 April 1833 Worcester City Museum was officially opened, the 6th oldest museum in Britain. One of the founding members of the Society, Charles Hastings (also the founder of the British Medical Association), wrote of the importance of studying the natural world around us to enjoy “the great delights that man experiences in contemplating the works of his Maker.”

From the 1830s the collection inspired Worcester residents by teaching them about the natural world around them. As well as plants, minerals, fossils and mammals, the Society collected almost 1300 bird specimens that formed the core of Worcester’s museum collection and enable researchers now to learn much about how Worcester’s biodiversity has changed over the last two centuries.

The juvenile starling and wood pigeon that you see pictured here are still regular sights on even the most built-up streets, with the starling’s distinctive chattering song and the pigeon’s owl-like hooting familiar sounds even in the city.

Jurassic fish

Geological specimens have formed a prominent part of the collections since Worcester’s museum was founded by the Worcestershire Natural History Society in 1833.

For the first 100 years of its history, the geological collection was in the care of a succession of curators – George Reece, W.H. Edwards and W.J. Else – who were keen and competent geologists and assiduous collectors. They greatly enriched the City’s collection. Today it contains around 12,000 rocks, fossils, minerals, ores, gemstones and meteorites, and many of our specimens have a very interesting story to tell, stretching back over 700 million years, of wandering continents, ever-changing landscapes, and of strange creatures who once lived on this part of the Earth’s crust.

At the beginning of the Jurassic period, a sea gently flooded England covering what is now Worcestershire. Its warm, life-giving waters were ruled by ferocious giant reptiles including plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs which fed on the many new kinds of shellfish- ammonites, bivalves and belemnites.

This rather beautiful fossil is a ray-finned bony Jurassic fish, Dapedium politum, which lived in such waters 200 million years ago. It was oval in outline and had a fan-shaped tail. At the front of its mouth were sharp upright nipping teeth and it had a pavement of circular crushing teeth at the back. It probably fed on small creatures such as crustaceans.

This specimen comes from the Lower Lias fish and reptile beds of Barrow in Soar, Leicestershire, and was given to Worcester Museum in 1852 by Rev W. Parker of Comberton.