This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473546509
Version 1.0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
VINTAGE
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Dave Goulson 2017
Dave Goulson has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in Vintage in 2018
First published in hardback by Jonathan Cape in 2017
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
A Sting in the Tale
A Buzz in the Meadow
For Mum & Dad
Thank you.
We hiked to the woods, only half a kilometre from the primary school, the kids holding hands in pairs and chattering excitedly. I led the way, toting a selection of beating trays and nets on my shoulder, and their teacher, Mrs Sharkey, fussed and chivvied at the back to keep them all together.
It was a sunny afternoon in June 2009, near the end of the school term, and I was taking the children of my eldest son Finn’s class at Newton Primary School, Dunblane, on a bug hunt. Dunblane is a lovely little town, nestled at the western end of the Ochil Hills in Central Scotland, with countryside to be found within a short walk in almost any direction. Once we got to the woods, I handed out the nets and other paraphernalia to the eager seven- and eight-year-old kids and showed them how each worked. All of the nets looked large and clumsy in the children’s hands, the butterfly nets being big enough to engulf the smaller children entirely. These kite-shaped nets look easy enough to use, but once a flying insect is caught there is a knack to flicking the end of the net over the frame to trap the creature in a pocket of material and prevent it from flying out again. I showed them how to place a beating tray (a large rectangle of white cloth stretched across a wooden frame) under a low-hanging branch, and then give the branch a good shake to dislodge insects, which tumble, wriggling and scampering in surprise, onto the white sheet. My sweep net demonstration provoked much hilarity – this sturdy white net has to be bashed through long grass, always keeping the mouth of the net facing forwards, which I find is best accomplished by sweeping it from side to side in flowing arcs while stooped forwards, bottom in the air. When doing this I resemble some sort of solo Morris dancer. At the end of the ‘dance’ I gathered up the bag of the net to prevent the insects escaping, and called the kids round to inspect the catch. Opening up a sweep net is always fun – like opening up a Christmas present, one never knows what marvels will be inside. The kids oohed, aahed and urghed as a myriad tiny creatures – ants, spiders, wasps, beetles, flies and caterpillars – flew, crawled and hopped out of the net. I showed them how to capture the smallest, most delicate ones by sucking them up in a pooter.fn1 I dished out a handful of pots each for them to place their captures in, and then the children were off, charging through the under-growth, bashing, sweeping and pooting to their hearts’ content, wide-eyed with excitement. We rolled over rotting logs and mossy rocks to find woodlice, ground beetles and millipedes (always carefully rolling them back afterwards). Every new catch was brought back proudly for me to inspect, from huge red slugs to delicate green lacewings. Shrieks of excitement announced the capture of a huge queen buff-tailed bumblebee, who buzzed loudly in protest. Finn, bless him, couldn’t resist being a bit of a know-it-all and telling the other children what everything was.
It was chaos, but after an hour or so we had a fantastic collection of creepy-crawlies of all shapes and sizes, all laid out in a selection of pots on one of the beating trays. We sorted them into their family groups, learning the difference between flies and wasps, beetles and true bugs, centipedes and millipedes. I told them a little about their diverse and often peculiar lives: which ones ate dung or leaves or other insects; about the parasitoid wasp that eats caterpillars alive from the inside out; and about the froghopper that spends most of its life hiding in a ball of its own spittle. As we let them go, I encouraged the children to hold some of the larger, more robust creatures – there was a beautiful hawthorn shield bug, bright green and rusty brown, with angular, pointed shoulders, which contentedly ambled from hand to hand until, with a flick of its wings, it suddenly whirred away. A half-grown speckled bush cricket, vivid leaf-green with tiny black spots, short-sightedly felt its way along their hands using its outsized antennae, perhaps four times its own body length. A delicate common red damselfly peered at us cautiously with its protruding eyes, as if unable to believe its luck at being released, before helicoptering away on silent, shimmering wings.
As I watched the children’s smiling faces, I was reminded of the words of the wise and famous biologist E. O. Wilson, who once said, ‘Every kid has a bug period … I never grew out of mine.’ It is interesting to speculate as to why children are innately fascinated by nature, why they like to collect, be it seashells, feathers, butterflies, pressed flowers, pine cones or bird eggs, and why they love to capture, hold and watch creatures of any and all sorts. I would imagine that in our hunter-gatherer past this curiosity served us well – obviously we needed to build up knowledge of the natural world if we were to survive, particularly as to which animals and plants were dangerous or good to eat, but also so that we could read more subtle signs from nature, interpreting the behaviour of birds that might warn of approaching danger, or indicate the location of water or food. I am often asked where my own early obsession with natural history sprang from, as if I were unusual, but actually I think I was fairly typical – as E. O. Wilson said, almost all of us have a bug period.
The bigger question is why do the large majority of children grow out of their fascination with bugs and, more broadly, with nature? What happens to the child who, aged eight, watched raptly as a woodlouse crawled over her palm? Sadly, by the time they are teenagers, most react to the buzz or scuttle of an insect with a mix of fear and aggression born of ignorance. As like as not, they will swat the poor creature, stamp on it, or at best shoo it away with panicked hands. What goes wrong? Why did their childhood delight evaporate, to be replaced by revulsion? I wonder about those kids in Dunblane, now teenagers. Have they become strangers to insects, forgetting that sunny afternoon, and all that they found so fascinating and fun at the time? Have they absorbed the fears of their parents, the absurd overreaction to a spider dangling from the curtain rail or to a wasp at a family picnic? My family and I have moved from Scotland to Sussex in the south of England since then, but Finn tells me that most of his new friends have not the slightest interest in wildlife – they simply do not see the natural world as in any way relevant to them. Their interests tend to focus on football or PlayStation or posting selfies on Instagram. Without the slightest thought, many of them casually throw drinks cans and crisp packets into the hedge on the way home from school. It is not cool to go birdwatching, and they would think that collecting or photographing or breeding butterflies and moths as a hobby was pretty weird and nerdy.
I would hazard a guess that this change comes about because children get too few opportunities to interact with nature in our modern, urbanised world. Our children will never come to cherish the natural world unless they get to experience it first hand, close up, on a regular basis. They cannot grow to love something that they do not know. If they have never been lucky enough to visit a wildflower meadow in late spring to smell the flowers, hear the bird and insect song and watch the butterflies flit amongst the grass, they probably won’t care much if one is destroyed. If they have never had the chance to clamber about in the dappled light of an ancient, wild wood, to kick their feet through the musty leaf litter and emerald leaves of dog’s mercury, and breathe in the rich, mushroomy odours of decay and growth, then it will be hard for them to understand what appalling sacrilege it is to rip it down and macerate the trees to make chipboard. Nothing I could write here, even if I had the gifts of Shakespeare himself, could truly convey the wonder and beauty of the natural world. Some fabulous nature documentaries have been made in recent decades, enabling us to marvel at all manner of exotic creatures that we are never likely to see, but I do not think that this is enough, though it may be a good start. We need to get kids outside, on their hands and knees, grubbing about with nature. For me, ten minutes with a bush cricket is worth ten hours of watching a television documentary in which birds of paradise perform their exotic mating dance in some faraway tropical forest.
Sadly, of course, these days few children have the opportunities that E. O. Wilson or I had to allow these interests to develop. More broadly, it seems that children today don’t have the chance to explore and experiment in quite the way that was possible for me growing up in the Seventies in a very rural corner of the English countryside. The majority of the world’s population now reside in cities – in the UK, a staggering 82 per cent of us now live in urban areas – and children are usually not allowed to roam as they once did. From the age of seven I wandered the countryside around my home village, disappearing off with my friends for hours on end without my parents having any idea where I was. We climbed trees, we fished the lakes and rivers, and we built camps in the woods. These days, of course, young children don’t normally get this freedom even if they live in the countryside, for their parents rightly fret over risks from traffic, or less reasonably fear that their child will be abducted by the evil monsters that are imagined to lurk around every corner. It might sound irresponsible of me, but I think children somehow need to be given more chances to explore, to take risks and do foolish, dangerous things from which they can learn. I should know, for during my childhood I did more than my fair share of foolish things, yet I somehow survived.
My very earliest memories involve insects of one sort or another – somehow they burrowed into my soul when I was very young. Aged five, I found the yellow-and-black hooped caterpillars of the cinnabar moth feeding on the groundsel growing through the cracks of my primary-school playground, and packed far too many of them among the crumbs left in my lunchbox to take home. I collected more groundsel to feed them, and was thrilled when some of them eventually developed into adult moths, weak-flying but beautiful creatures with glossy magenta and black wings (which I learned much later are a warning that they are poisonous, having accumulated the toxins that are supposed to protect the ragwort from being eaten). I collected millipedes, woodlice and beetles from the garden, and the tiny red mites that scurried about on the low concrete wall in front of our house on sunny days, and I kept them all in jam jars, lined up on the windowsill of my bedroom. I guess many of the poor creatures died, but I learned a huge amount, not least from the Oxford Book of Insects that my parents bought me so that I could find out what my catches were. In the evenings, I pored over the watercolour illustrations and made plans for local expeditions in which I imagined that I might find some of the more exotic creatures – great silver water beetles, emperor dragonflies and death’s head hawk moths.
When I was seven we moved from our small semi-detached house on the edge of Birmingham to the rural village of Edgmond in Shropshire, which provided many more opportunities for creature-hunting. I made school friends who were similarly minded, and we would spend our lunchtimes searching the hawthorn hedges along the edge of the school field for the beautiful caterpillars of the yellow-tail moth, velvet black adorned with a crazy Mohican row of red, black and white tufts of hairs. At weekends we searched for other types of caterpillar, scouring the hedgerows, meadows and copses around our village. With the help of the Observer’s Book of Caterpillars, another gift from my parents, we worked out what each type was as best we could, and found the correct leaves to feed them. I found their specificity intriguing – most moth and butterfly caterpillars will eat just one or perhaps two types of leaf, and will simply starve to death rather than try to eat anything else. A few types are much less fussy – the enormously hairy black and orange caterpillars of the garden tiger would eat almost anything apart from grass.fn2 On one occasion we found a caterpillar of the puss moth feeding on a willow, a fantastic green and black creature which reared up when frightened, and extruded a pair of intimidating red, writhing tentacles from its forked tail. I had to wait nearly a whole year until the following spring before I got to see the adult moth: a splendid, fat-bodied, furry kitten-like animal, its body and wings snow-white speckled with black.
When I was only seven or eight I began collecting birds’ eggs, something my dad had done himself as a boy. As I recall, almost every boy in my village had a collection (I’ve no idea what the girls did – having no sisters and going to a boys’ grammar school, until the age of about fourteen I was almost completely unaware that girls existed). We vied with each other to find the nests of the more unusual species, and coveted each other’s finds. Once again, the Observer’s series of natural history books was invaluable – I still have my tattered copy of the Observer’s Book of Birds’ Eggs, nearly fifty years old. I remember finding a blue egg with pale brown speckles lying abandoned on the ground on the slopes of the Long Mynd in south Shropshire, and I convinced myself that it was the egg of a ring ouzel, a spectacularly rare moorland bird that I had never actually seen. My friends were sceptical, and we argued about its identity for days, though with hindsight I’m pretty sure it was just the egg of a blackbird. We learned a huge amount about the natural history of birds in the process, for each species tends to nest in particular places, makes its nest from characteristic materials, and so on. On a couple of occasions we found nests of the long-tailed tit, extraordinarily beautiful spherical constructions woven from spider’s web and soft moss.
I moved on from this to collecting butterflies, and expanded this to moths, and then beetles, and eventually became fairly expert in identifying them all. My skills in rearing moths and butterflies came in useful, for they enabled me to get perfect, untarnished adults for my collection, but by the age of twelve or so I eventually tired of killing these lovely creatures and began rearing them simply to release back into the wild. In particular, I reared hundreds of peacocks and small tortoiseshells, collecting up the young caterpillars from nettle patches and rearing them up in home-made cages where they could not be attacked by the tachinid flies and chalcid wasps that parasitise most of them in the wild. It was a heart-warming experience watching the young adult butterflies tentatively take flight for the first time, their pristine wings freshly dried, fluttering upwards and eventually soaring out of our garden.
It wasn’t just natural history that captured my youthful attention. When I started secondary school, I quickly came to love science of all types, particularly the pyrotechnics of chemistry and the thrill of danger associated with electricity. My parents gave my elder brother, Chris, and me a chemistry set and, as countless children have before and since, we spent hours heating up random mixtures of chemicals on the small methylated-spirit burner, usually creating nothing but a sticky brown mess and a cloud of noxious smoke. Risking an instant detention or worse, my friends and I would smuggle small pieces of magnesium ribbon out of chemistry classes and delight in setting light to them in the bushes at the bottom of the school playing field during lunch break. They burned so brightly that we had white spots before our eyes through the afternoon lessons. After seeing demonstrations in which our teacher dropped small pieces of sodium or potassium into a sink of water – at which point these highly unstable metals fizzed and banged, sending up spurts of flame and clouds of steam – we longed to get our hands on some, but our unsporting teacher never let them out of his sight and always locked them away in a metal cupboard at the end of lessons.
Luckily my parents were as tolerant of my early chemistry experiments as they were of my enthusiasm for filling the house with jam jars, cages and tanks full of creatures, although they rarely knew exactly what my friends and I were up to. As we learned a little chemistry, we managed to devise ways to conduct ever-more dangerous and entertaining experiments at home. With my friend Dave (there were five Daves in my class at school, and for boys of my generation it might have been useful if someone had invented a collective noun for groups of us) we worked out how to produce hydrogen and oxygen gas by passing electricity through water. The transformer from my Scalextric set proved to be an invaluable power supply for such experiments, producing a steady twelve volts that was ideal for this. The hydrogen and oxygen could be collected in bottles and the two gases together exploded with deliciously satisfying violence when lit with a match, though the lighting was not without minor risk. I even learned to produce chlorine gas in a complicated experiment on the kitchen worktop that involved passing electricity through domestic bleach; the clouds of brown gas are highly toxic, and the experiment was so unexpectedly successful that I nearly expired before I could turn the apparatus off and get the windows open.
At around this time Chris and I were collecting second-hand books to sell on a stall at an upcoming school fete – although I can’t recall, I imagine that my father volunteered us for this task as I can’t imagine my brother or I ever volunteering to go door-to-door in the village with a wheelbarrow, collecting unwanted books. However, as it turned out, it had unexpected benefits; amongst the piles of yellowing romance novels and endless Agatha Christie murder mysteries, I found a small book called simply Explosives. You can imagine my excitement at opening this treasure and discovering it contained details of how to make a multitude of highly dangerous, sometimes unstable compounds. It was disappointing that most of the instructions required reagents that were unavailable to a boy of twelve; for example, it was clear from the outset that I would never find a way to get hold of the necessary quantities of concentrated acids required to make TNT. However, the recipe for gunpowder looked tantalisingly possible. Gunpowder, or black powder as it is cryptically known to aficionados, contains just three ingredients: sulphur, charcoal and potassium nitrate. My children’s chemistry set contained sulphur, and charcoal was easy enough, although grinding barbecue charcoal to the required powder was a messy process. That left only potassium nitrate. The book explained that there are significant quantities of potassium nitrate in pigeon excrement, and that extraction was possible with care. It took some time to locate a pigeon fancier in the village, but eventually, by dint of a lot of furtive peering over garden fences, we spotted a pigeon loft complete with cooing occupants. If we had possessed any common sense, we would have simply knocked on the door of the house and asked for some pigeon droppings – I suspect that the owner would have been happy to give us some, so long as we gave a vaguely plausible explanation – but we feared that the owner might rumble our true intentions. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems unlikely that they would have jumped to the conclusion that we wanted the droppings so that we could make a bomb, but in our paranoid imagination this seemed a real possibility. Anyway, once we had decided against the direct approach a covert night-time operation seemed the obvious alternative. My mate Dave (one of the many) and I snuck into the garden one dark evening and were relieved to find the loft unlocked – pigeon rustling and dung theft presumably being rare occurrences in rural Shropshire at the time. It was messy and extremely smelly work scraping up the droppings into a carrier bag in the pitch black – we dared not turn on a torch – and the pigeons started to make a racket, nervously flapping about and splattering us with droppings from above, so we made a hasty retreat, satisfied with our haul. I have often wondered if the pigeon fancier noticed that someone had mysteriously cleaned out his pigeons in the middle of the night.
The next day we set about extracting the potassium nitrate. The book didn’t explain how to do this, which was an unfortunate oversight on the part of the author. We knew it to be water soluble, so using our rudimentary knowledge of chemistry we figured that we should be able to rinse the potassium nitrate from the faeces, sieve out the solids, and then extract the chemical from the resulting solution. At the bottom of my garden we mixed the droppings into a bucket of warm water, and then sieved out the lumps using an old tea towel. It was pretty unpleasant work. We ended up with a bucket of extremely smelly, pale brownish liquid. We decided that all we then needed to do was drive off the water by boiling the liquid for a while, which should hopefully leave us with something that was mostly potassium nitrate. I started this process in an old pan on the kitchen stove, but predictably and understandably my mum immediately evicted us from the house. Luckily I had previously rigged up a Bunsen burner to an old camping-gas cylinder in the shed, so we resorted to that. It took hours, and as the liquid thickened the stench became ever more horrendous, but eventually the pan’s contents had boiled down to a sticky brown mess. It didn’t look much like potassium nitrate, which we knew was supposed to be a white crystalline solid, but we hoped that it might do the job.
We carefully mixed the brown goo with sulphur and charcoal in the allotted proportions. The resulting mess was an interesting greenish black paste. We took a small portion, placed it on the bottom of an upturned tin can, and I gingerly applied a match, my heart hammering with excitement. The match stuttered, the powder spluttered, and then … nothing. I tried again and again but it was hopeless. Clearly there was not as much potassium nitrate in pigeon dung as we had hoped, or perhaps our extraction method was ineffective, or maybe they were just the wrong type of pigeons.
A little research revealed that potassium nitrate was sometimes sold as a garden fertiliser. In fact, a small gardening shop close to my school in Newport turned out to stock it, along with a range of other desirable chemicals, but all were kept on a high shelf behind the counter. My friends and I surreptitiously checked them out while pretending to browse the packs of vegetable seeds. Eventually I plucked up the courage to try to buy some, certain that the shopkeeper would suspect my true purpose. He was an elderly, grey-haired man with a stern air, and he immediately started quizzing me as to what I wanted it for. I went bright red with embarrassment – I’ve always been a hopelessly unconvincing liar – and stammered that it was for an experiment for school, to see how potassium nitrate affected how well plants grew. My friends had formed a phalanx behind me for moral support, and the bolder ones chipped in various additions, including something about a school competition to see who could grow the biggest vegetables. It was vaguely plausible, though unlikely, but I stubbornly stuck to my guns as he cross-questioned me, and eventually he reluctantly brought down a two-pound box from the shelf. I’m sure he knew we were up to no good, but he couldn’t prove it and perhaps he was glad to sell something, for the shop was always very quiet. I handed over my money, grabbed the box, and we sped off before he could change his mind.
Gunpowder proved to be tremendous fun. It didn’t explode but it burned ferociously, emitting clouds of sulphurous smoke, the evocative smell of fireworks on a cold November night. We experimented with different proportions of the ingredients, setting off small piles on a piece of slate at the bottom of the garden where the prying eyes of parents were unlikely to notice us. As we honed the mixture it burned ever faster and lighting it with a match often resulted in singed fingers, so we worked out how to make fuses from twists of loo paper soaked in potassium-nitrate solution and then dried out. We experimented with adding other chemicals from our chemistry sets to try to change the colours of the flame or the smoke, and we packed tubes of cardboard with gunpowder with various additions to produce our own primitive fireworks. They were all pretty hopeless compared to professional fireworks, but as with all things home-made they were somehow a lot more satisfying than the bought variety.
My friend Dave came up with an alternative pyrotechnic formula, based on sodium chlorate weedkiller mixed with sugar, and we vied with each other to produce the best fireworks. We spent weeks trying to create rockets that would actually take off, though we never got the hang of this – the highest we ever managed to get one to go was about four feet into the air, before it flipped over and hurtled to the ground. Our garden lawns became pocked with brown scorch-marks from our many failed launch attempts.
Although the powders we created were highly inflammable, they did not actually explode, which was something of a disappointment. Eventually we discovered that the only way to create explosions was to seal the powder inside a more or less airtight container, and then light it. This of course is tricky, for how do you light something once you have sealed it in a container, and how do you do so while maintaining a safe distance so as not to get blown up? My book, Explosives, was little help on this point. After a lot of discussions, trials and errors, Dave and I found the answer, in the form of the old-fashioned disposable flash cubes used in photography. Younger readers may be surprised to hear that it wasn’t so long ago that cameras didn’t come with a flash as standard, but instead had a mounting point for a disposable plastic flash cube which contained four one-use bulbs. Each time you took a picture, the forward-pointing bulb would burn white hot and self-destruct, producing enough light to take a single photograph. You would then rotate the cube a quarter-turn to ready the next bulb for action. Amazingly, the only power needed to make one of these bulbs fry itself was a normal 1.5 volt AA battery.
We found that these bulbs, once carefully dissected out of the plastic casing, would readily light my gunpowder or Dave’s weedkiller mix. So we made thick tubes of cardboard and filled them with our pyrotechnic powder along with a flash bulb attached to two thin wires that led out of the tube. We sealed the tubes up with layers and layers of gaffer tape. All we then needed to do was attach the wires to the terminals of a battery and, hey presto, BANG! The tubes would fly apart with an ear-splitting crack, leaving only a few smoking remains. It was brilliant fun, and before long we moved on to using copper pipes to get a bigger bang – these really made the earth shake when they went off, leaving scraps of twisted metal lying around. To ensure that we were at a safe distance, we rigged up the battery with an old-fashioned alarm clock, with a wire pushed through a hole drilled in the glass face making contact with the minute hand when it reached the vertical. In this way we could set the bombs off with a delay of up to about fifty-five minutes, and then sit and watch them go off on cue from a few hundred yards away. We had lots of fun with these homemade pipe bombs, planting them in holes in trees, crevices in the rock wall of a local abandoned quarry, and once in holes in the brick wall of a crumbling, abandoned farm building. They weren’t particularly powerful, but would usually blast a few bits of wood or rock or brick up into the air. On one occasion we even put one in the local canal, having seen dynamite fishing on the television. The blast didn’t kill any fish, but it produced a satisfying eruption of water.
Bomb making might not seem the safest of activities for young teenagers to be engaged in, and I would absolutely not encourage such things, but it was relatively harmless compared to our tampering with the local electricity supply. On one ill-fated Sunday morning when I was thirteen, my friends Matt and Tug (Tim) and I were messing around in my garden with a piece of old, rusty barbed wire we had acquired from somewhere. It was a couple of yards long, and made an interesting whistling noise when whirled around enthusiastically above one’s head. However, this didn’t keep us interested for long and so for some reason I decided to whirl it round and then attempt to throw it from the garden, across the road in front of our house, and into the field beyond. I hadn’t noticed the electrical cables strung from telegraph post to telegraph post along the street. The barbed wire hit one, snagged, and swung around to contact a second cable at which point there was a loud bang, a shower of orange sparks, and two pieces of barbed wire fell to the ground. On closer inspection we discovered that the wire had melted right through in the middle, and was still glowing red hot on the pavement. Presumably the high voltage electricity shorting through the barbed wire had been too much for it. This was brilliant sport, and of course we wanted to do it again.
It dawned on us that it might be wise to find somewhere a little more secluded – my front lawn not being the most discreet of locations. So we wandered off towards the edge of the village, searching for some more barbed wire as we went, since the pieces we now had were too short. It took a while to find any, but eventually we found an old coil of surplus wire attached to a fence post in the corner of a field, and by dint of a lot of bending the wire backwards and forwards we managed to break off a piece. We took it with us and headed off up the nearest lane, beyond the last house, until we found some more overhead cables. With hindsight, we should perhaps have noticed that these cables were higher than the ones outside my house, and mulled upon the significance of that fact. We ought also to have noticed that they were somewhat thicker, but what with them being so high this wasn’t all that obvious. Regardless of such subtleties, we set about hoiking our piece of barbed wire at the cables. Because of their height, this was much more difficult than with the cables by my house. We took it in turns, whirling the wire around our heads and launching it skywards. Every now and then the wire would hit one cable and fall back without effect. It took us nearly two hours before, as luck would have it, it was I that finally managed to get the barbed wire to snag one cable, spin, and touch a second. What happened next is indelibly etched into my memory. There was a deafening bang and a white flash that resembled lightning. One of us shouted ‘RUN!’ – it may have been me, or it may have been all of us simultaneously. We fled. As we pelted towards the village, I glanced back to see the two overhead cables fall to the ground, thrashing and sparking as they did so. This was not quite what we had intended.
We ran back to my house, which happened to be the nearest, and we hid in the garden shed. We sat on the piles of second-hand romance novels left over from the school fete, pondering our next move. We knew this was bad, and could not see much chance of escaping major trouble. We’d spent so long in the lane by the power lines that at least a dozen cars had passed by that morning, and in our small village everybody knew everybody; it wouldn’t take long for someone to work out who the culprits were. Eventually we decided that there was nothing for it but for each of us to go home and confess. With my stomach in my boots I walked in through the back door of our house to find my mum in an uncharacteristically bad mood. She’d been in the middle of roasting a big joint for Sunday lunch, and there had been a power cut. There was no gas in the village, so every Sunday lunch had been cooking in an electric oven. Now, all over the village, half-cooked chickens and sides of beef were slowly cooling. In the two village pubs, the Lion and the Lamb, dozens of Sunday lunches would never now be properly cooked. In the late 1970s power cuts were quite common, but they were usually at night and there was usually a warning in advance. On this occasion, of course, there had been no warning.
This was something I hadn’t anticipated, and I ran outside again without saying a word to my mum; Tug and Matt were still within sight, since each had been walking rather reluctantly and hence slowly in opposite directions towards their respective homes. I called them back and told them what had happened. It was much worse than bad. This was a disaster on a biblical scale. We hid back in the shed. Matt suggested, without conviction, that perhaps the power cut was a coincidence. We knew it wasn’t. In fact, as it subsequently turned out, we had by chance hit upon the 11,000-volt power lines that were the sole power source to the village. It took most of the rest of the day for an emergency team from the electricity board to repair them. My friends and I were still sitting in the gloom of the shed when the local policeman arrived in his Mini police car. He was not particularly well disposed to us since a couple of years earlier he had caught us taking potshots at his geese with our home-made catapults (which he had confiscated and incinerated), so he delighted in carting us off to the tiny police station in nearby Newport.
In the end, we got off with a small fine and slapped wrists. The worst of it for me was the embarrassment caused to my dad, who as a local schoolteacher saw himself as a pillar of the community. Naturally enough, he was mortified to have his son hauled in front of the magistrates. To make matters worse, the headmaster of his school also lived in our village and had lost his Sunday lunch on that fateful day.
Of course I’m not advocating that children be allowed to go around blowing up farm buildings and sabotaging power lines, or for that matter collecting birds’ eggs. Some of the many things that we did were highly dangerous and idiotic. However, I am not sure that I would have become a scientist as an adult if I had not been able to indulge at least some of these youthful enthusiasms in the ways that I did. Perhaps my parents were too tolerant, and probably also somewhat naïve, but I am enormously grateful that they gave me as much slack as they did (though perhaps some words of wisdom about the dangers of high-voltage electricity might have come in handy). I try to let my own boys, now five, twelve and fourteen years old, have enough freedom to learn for themselves. I wince when I see them swinging from branches near the tops of tall trees, and perhaps I shouldn’t let the five-year-old play with my axe or my hammer drill, but at the time of writing they have so far all survived. I’ve bought them ingredients for home-made fireworks, although I try to keep an eye on what they are up to and have ruled out pipe bombs as a step too far. They too haven’t yet got a rocket to take off, and our lawn bears numerous scorch-marks from their unsuccessful launch attempts. I’ve also tried to give them every chance to engage with the natural world. We are lucky, for we live in the weald of rural Sussex, surrounded by woods, pasture and streams, which they can explore in relative safety – the biggest dangers they are likely to encounter are themselves. In the summer, we go down to our little farm in the deepest, darkest French countryside where they can run amok. I don’t know whether they will follow me in studying natural history, but at least they have had ample opportunity to fall in love with nature. My eldest, Finn, can now identify most wildflowers, and Jedd has become an adept insect photographer. Seth, the youngest, simply wants to catch everything, put it in a Tupperware container, and watch it – he is very much still in his bug period, long may it last. I am sure that they will do their best to champion nature’s cause in the future.
Sadly, I fear that they are the exception. I do not know for sure, but my impression is that engagement with nature is declining, that the generation growing up today are even more detached from the world that supports them than the one before, and if so then it is a terrible thing. Even today, in the midst of a mass extinction event caused solely by man’s activities, with climate change threatening to render large portions of the globe near uninhabitable in the not-to-distant future, and with topsoil being lost at the rate of about one hundred billion tonnes per year, environmental issues remain pretty low on the political agenda. The environment was scarcely mentioned in the 2015 UK general election campaigns, even by the Green Party. Most of the debate focused on the economy, but money will be little use to us when we have no soil or bees.
If we want to save the natural world, and ultimately to save ourselves, then we need more people to care about its fate. First and foremost, we need to ensure that our children grow up with opportunities to explore nature for themselves, to get covered in mud chasing frogs or crawl through hedges looking for caterpillars. We need to give them the opportunity to express their natural curiosity, to watch a butterfly emerge from her pupae, to see tadpoles developing tiny limbs, to experience the excitement of discovering a slow-worm under a log. If we give them this, then they will love nature, cherish it and fight for it in the future.
I was fortunate enough to do all of these things as a child, and it inspired me to spend the rest of my life pursuing my own curiosity with regard to natural history. I have been lucky enough to travel the world and have watched birdwing butterflies soaring through the rainforests of Borneo and listened to howler monkeys proclaiming their territories in the forests of Belize, amongst so many other unforgettable experiences. Much closer to home, I have spent countless happy hours hunting for insects, birds, reptiles, mammals and flowers in the less spectacular but just as wonderful woods and meadows of France and Britain. I have been lucky – I was brought up in the countryside, and then stumbled into a career that allows me to spend my time chasing after the world’s most interesting bees, in the hope of understanding more about them, of unravelling some of the unknown details of their lives, and trying to work out how we can conserve them so that others might enjoy them in the future. This book is the story of those bee travels. We’ll start close to home, in some of the hidden corners of Britain where wildlife still thrives, before moving abroad to the wild mountains of Poland and then to the Andes and Rocky Mountains of the New World, where a sad tale is inexorably unfolding for their bumblebees. Finally, we will return to Britain for some inspiring and hope-filled examples of nature’s resilience. Welcome to Bee Quest …
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Carl Sagan
I have in the past been heard to blame Adolf Hitler for causing the demise of British bumblebees, for it was the Second World War that really started the drive to increase food production in the UK – at the time, it made sense for Britain to attempt to become as self-sufficient as possible for food, as there were precious few routes for importation. Thus began decades of agricultural intensification, during which a good deal of our countryside was destroyed to make way for vast monocultures of crops. However, if I continue with this line of logic then I must concede that the Kaiser and Hitler perhaps deserve some grudging acknowledgement, for their actions also unwittingly led to the creation of one of the largest nature reserves in Europe.
In 1897 the Ministry of Defence began purchasing land on Salisbury Plain on which to conduct military training exercises.fn1 At the time, Britain had a vast empire and had been involved in a long succession of conflicts around the globe – it was a lot of work claiming new territories in far-flung corners of the Earth, and it took a lot of well-trained troops to keep so many poorly armed native peoples firmly under our thumb. During the sixty-three years of Queen Victoria’s long reign, we were involved in no less than thirty-six full-blown wars, plus eighteen military campaigns and ninety-eight military expeditions. Our standing army was vast, and we needed somewhere to train all those men. Recognising this, the government passed an act enabling the army to buy its own land, by compulsory purchase if necessary. It made sense for the army to focus on an area not too far from transport links, London and the Channel ports, somewhere where there were few people, and where land prices were low. Salisbury Plain fitted the bill perfectly, for the collapse of the wool industry in the mid-1800s had made Wiltshire one of the poorest counties in Britain. The army began an extended shopping spree – in 1897 alone it bought about 6,000 hectares of the Plain, plus various other chunks elsewhere in Britain.
Prior to the arrival of the army, the Plain had had an ancient history of human occupation. It comprises a huge slab of chalk, laid down as the shells of countless trillions of tiny dead sea creatures accumulating at the bottom of an ancient sea some hundred million years ago, but now raised up in a rolling plateau that gently inclines from south to north, and reaches not much more than 200 metres above sea level at the highest points. It would have become forested as the ice retreated from Britain after the last ice age, but along with the North and South Downs it was one of the first areas to be cleared of trees by early Neolithic settlers perhaps 5,500 years ago – the thin chalk soils would have made it less difficult to grub out the roots than in the lower surrounding areas. There are signs of human activity from even earlier – the rotted stumps of a line of regularly spaced upright poles sunk into the ground some 8,000 years ago, for an unknowable purpose. We can glean very little about how these people lived, but their presence is evidenced by the many strange barrows, tumuli, hill forts and other odd-shaped mounds of mysterious origin that are littered across the Plain.