Frank Buckland ate his way through the animal kingdom, but as The Man Who Ate The Zoo shows, the naturalist also pioneered fish farming to feed the UK's poorest

Buckland fought for a dependable supply of fish for the UK’s poorest Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo

BIG bushy beard: check. Bizarre childhood: check. House stuffed with exotic and sometimes scary animals (not all stuffed): check. In the roll call of Victorian eccentrics, a man who dissects his dad, dines on fried viper and roast giraffe and tries to become a salmon must rank somewhere near the top.

Thanks to Richard Girling’s biography, my current favourite nutty naturalist is Frank Buckland: surgeon, zoologist, pioneering fish farmer. What gives him the edge is that for all his wacky ways, he was tireless in his search for knowledge about the natural world and for the best of reasons. Buckland wanted to find better sources of food to feed the poor and became a tireless champion of fish. He never made the grade academically yet became a respected expert, sell-out speaker and hugely popular writer.

Buckland was never going to be ordinary. He grew up among piles of fossils, bones and a menagerie of strange animals because his father was the equally eccentric William Buckland, the University of Oxford’s first geology professor and an eminent churchman. It was Buckland senior who instigated the family interest in improving the nation’s diet. Dinner might include hedgehog, horse, puppy – even crocodile, turtle or half-rotten bear. Surrounded by animals alive, deconstructed or on his plate, Buckland junior began his own investigation of the natural world.

Throughout his life, Buckland observed, dissected and tasted. Secondhand facts weren’t good enough: he had to find out for himself. There was nothing he wouldn’t taste. Roasted field mice made “a splendid bonne bouche for a hungry boy”. Boa constrictor tasted like veal. Kangaroos were an ideal source of good meat, with their long tails better than oxtail. But earwigs were “horribly bitter”.

Decomposing panther wasn’t a huge success either. Hearing that the panther at a friend’s zoo had died, “I wrote… at once to tell him to send me down some chops. It had, however, been buried a couple of days, but I got them to dig it up… It was not very good.”

Buckland’s eating habits make for entertaining reading, but there are other reasons to remember him. He had hoped to do good as a surgeon, but spent much of his time as unofficial vet at London Zoo (a good source of previously untasted species) until he threw himself into the cause that occupied the rest of his life: fish.

“Earwigs were ‘horribly bitter’ to eat and decomposing panther was not a huge success either”

Buckland founded the UK’s Acclimatisation Society to identify and introduce new food crops and animals. But he quickly concluded that the best way to feed protein-starved families was to ensure a dependable supply of fish.

He developed techniques for hatching fish eggs, hoping to restock depleted rivers. He spelled out why so few rivers supported salmon: most were filthy. “Manufacturers of all kinds of materials… seem to think rivers are convenient channels kindly given to them by nature to carry away… the refuse of their works.”

Weirs were another problem, preventing salmon returning upriver to spawn. Those that did make it were poached before they could breed. Buckland tackled every problem, river by river – even wading in to see for himself the obstacles salmon face.

He identified threats to coastal fisheries and argued for government-sponsored research. “We shall keep stumbling and blundering along until there are no fish left to catch, unless we at once grasp the lamp of science and guided by its light, boldly strive to find out for ourselves what actually is going on.”

When Buckland wasn’t leaping into rivers, he was writing a stream of articles that changed how people looked at the natural world. Nature, he convinced a previously uninterested public, was to be admired and protected. In his lifetime he was revered. After he died, he was forgotten. But unlike the panther, Buckland was well worth digging up again. And if you want to know why he dissected his dad, read the book.

The Man Who Ate the Zoo: Frank Buckland, forgotten hero of natural history Richard Girling Chatto & Windus

This article appeared in print under the headline “A curious life”