William Buckland’s Unusual Natural-History Experiment
William Buckland approached the animal world not only as something to classify, but as something he could sample. A clergyman and naturalist who became Dean of Westminster, he reportedly tried the flesh of an improbable range of creatures, from small mammals to larger predators. The point was personal and immediate: tasting turned an unfamiliar animal from a specimen into a sensory experience.
A Menu That Became a Ranking
The tastings were not simply a test of whether an animal could be eaten. They produced comparisons. Toasted mice and roasted hedgehogs were among the dishes Buckland sampled; panther chops extended the experiment to a much larger animal. A mole, by contrast, reportedly struck him as especially unpleasant—until a bluebottle fly gave him a still worse point of comparison.
That shifting scale is the memorable part of the story. “Edible” says little about flavor, and one person’s verdict is no universal measure. Buckland’s reported trials made the distinctions vivid: an animal could be technically chewable yet rank among the worst things he had tasted.
Curiosity With a Very Literal Method
Buckland’s exploits fit a period when naturalists sought knowledge through close observation and hands-on collecting. His approach took that impulse to an unusually literal extreme: instead of stopping at an animal’s appearance or anatomy, he made taste part of the encounter. The result was a private catalogue organized not by scientific classification, but by the question of what each creature was like to eat.
The bluebottle’s role in the tale is more than a gruesome punch line. It shows how even Buckland’s harshest verdict depended on comparison—and how a single fly could make a mole seem less revolting by comparison.
