What the heck is a lek?
Males great bustards perform spectacular courtship displays, gathering at a ‘lek’ or small display ground to try to impress the females.
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This skin of a reticulated Python is over three metres long and poses quite the conservation puzzle for staff and volunteers when the time came to pack and safely store it away during a tidy of the Natural History storeroom!
Safely storing the biological side of natural history collections can be a real challenge, not least for the obvious reason that there are very few square or rectangular animals that fit neatly on shelves or in boxes! There are plenty of other issues too, specimens can be extremely fragile, and bugs and their larvae love to eat them. Even attempts to keep the pests away can cause issues many years down the line with specimens full of arsenic and lead that is deadly to both pests and humans!
This preserved snake skin, believed to have belonged to a reticulated Python, had avoided the ravages of pests but instead suffered from being rolled up for many years in the museum’s stores. Fully unrolling the skin highlighted how large this python must have been and provided the opportunity to take some measurements and give it a good clean. After spending so long rolled up, it was decided that it would do more harm than good to store the skin flat, meaning a safe rolling solution would be needed. An added complication was the need to support the snake’s plater of paris filled head, which made it surprisingly heavy.
A few ideas were tried but, in the end, the winning solution was to use a large, stiff cardboard tube, wrapped in foam and acid-free paper as a makeshift core. The skin was then slowly wrapped around this core while layering each coil with acid free tissue, so the skin never touched itself, which limited abrasion as much as possible. After the coiling was complete, a bubble wrap cushion was made for the head to sit on and the whole skin could be neatly place into a bubble wrapped lined box, success!
The reticulated Python is far from the only snake from a far-flung locale to be found in the Poole Museum collection. Rattlesnakes and vipers sit alongside British snakes, like adders, collected from the heaths around Poole. One specimen splitting the difference is the ‘Beh Belle Chemin’ or ‘Beauty of the Road’ snake which usually lives on the other side of the Atlantic but in this case was captured on the Parkstone Golf Course. The label on the jar reassures that us this type of snake is harmless, which is true, but it must have been quite a shock for anyone out for a quick round that day!
Surprisingly, this isn’t the only link between snakes and golf on the South Coast. The tale of famous New Forest snake catcher Brusher Mills and the Queens Park Golf Course is better told by Bournemouth Libraries Michael Stead.
Males great bustards perform spectacular courtship displays, gathering at a ‘lek’ or small display ground to try to impress the females.
The great bustard has a dignified slow walk but tends to run when disturbed, rather than fly.
The hen-bird on display at The Salisbury Museum was one of the last great bustards to be eaten in the town!