by Dave Goulson
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Preface
Part I: Tales from the Meadow
1. A Stroll in the Meadow
2. The Insect Empire
3. Chez les Newts
4. Mating Wheels and Sexual Cannibalism
5. Filthy Flies
6. The Secret Life of the Meadow Brown
7. Paper Wasps and Drifting Bees
8. The Mating Habits of the Death-Watch Beetle
9. The True Bugs
Part II: The Rich Tapestry of Life
10. Hothouse Flowers
11. Robbing Rattle
12. Smutty Campions
Part III: Unravelling the Tapestry
13. The Disappearing Bees
14. The Inbred Isles
15. Easter Island
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
Also by Dave Goulson
About the Author
Copyright
For Lara
Preface
In 2003 I bought a derelict farm deep in the heart of rural France, together with thirteen hectares of surrounding meadow. My aim was to create a wildlife sanctuary, a place where butterflies, dragon-flies, voles and newts could thrive, free from the pressures of modern agriculture. In particular I was keen to create a place for my beloved bumblebees, creatures I have spent the last twenty years studying and attempting to conserve. This book, in part, is the story of this little corner of the French countryside, of the plants and animals that live there, of their natural history, and of my efforts to encourage them. Most natural-history documentaries and much conservation effort focus on large, charismatic animals: whales, pandas, tigers, and so on. One of my aims in writing this book is to inspire an appreciation for the smaller, everyday creatures that live all around us – the insects and their kin. As chance would have it, many of the insects and flowers that have colonised the farm are species that I myself have studied over the years in my scientific career, and I explain some of the research that has been carried out to explore their secret lives. You will learn how a death-watch beetle finds its mate; about the importance of flies; how some flowers act as thermal blankets for bees; and about the complex politics of life as a paper wasp, amongst much else. In telling these stories perhaps I can also convey to you the fun of discovery, the satisfaction to be had in teasing apart the details of the lives of the creatures with which we share our planet. More importantly, I want you to realise that what we know and understand about natural history is just the tip of the iceberg. Even among the creatures that inhabit this single meadow, there is no doubt a near-infinite number of beguiling mysteries that have yet to be explained, animals that have never been studied, behaviours that have not yet been observed. What wonders have still to be discovered?
In the second part of the book I show you how the lives of the creatures in the meadow are interwoven with each other and with the wild flowers. Plants compete for space, water and light, are food for herbivores, hosts to parasites and diseases. They use diverse strategies to tempt pollinators to visit them, and in turn their pollinators have evolved numerous tricks so that they can learn which flowers are most rewarding and can gather those rewards quickly, sometimes robbing their hosts, at other times being duped into pollinating flowers for no reward. Plants depend on a horde of small animals and microorganisms to break down leaves and dung to release their nutrients, and they benefit from the actions of predatory birds, spiders and insects that keep down the numbers of caterpillars, grasshoppers and greenfly that might eat their leaves. Every species is linked, one way or another, to hundreds of others, in a web of interactions that are at present far beyond our ability to fully comprehend.
In the final part, I explain how the modern world has become increasingly inhospitable for wildlife, as humans squeeze ever more from the land to provide for our many needs. I give some examples of the devastation we have caused – and are causing – to our planet, from the effects of primitive man’s prehistoric spread out of Africa to the insidious damage that we continue to do through our overuse of poisonous chemicals in the countryside. Many of the fascinating creatures with which we share our world are slowly disappearing as a result of our actions, often before we have learned a single thing about their lives, or of their role in the tapestry of life. This book is intended as a wake-up call, to remind us that we should cherish life on Earth in all its forms. As species become extinct, so the mysteries of their lives are lost for ever. We are destroying our children’s inheritance, stealing from them the joy of discovery and exploration of the natural world. What is more, we are undermining the ability of our planet to support us; although we understand very little about the myriad complex interactions between the many creatures on this Earth, we do have good evidence to suggest that these interactions are vital to the health of the planet, and hence are vital for our own well-being and perhaps for our very survival.
I want to make you look at our world with new eyes; to persuade you to go out into your garden or a local park and get down on your hands and knees and look. There is so much to see. If you look closely enough, you cannot fail to begin to appreciate the precious undiscovered glory that is life on planet Earth. If we learn to value what we have, then perhaps we will find a way to keep it.
PART I
Tales from the Meadow
We inhabit a spherical rock, just 13,000 kilometres miles across, floating in the unimaginable vastness of space. It is at least ten thousand billion kilometres to the nearest planet that might possibly support any other life, a distance of which our brains cannot begin to conceive. We spend much time and effort on building telescopes that can look ever further into the void, and on listening to and analysing radio waves from distant galaxies, in the hope of detecting signs of other life forms. Many films, TV shows and novels speculate about what might be out there. Yet there are real wonders of the universe right here, all around us, and we pay them little heed. We are lucky enough to share our little rock with perhaps ten million different species, and many of them have not yet even been given a name.
I am fortunate enough to own a small hay meadow in rural France. Being something akin to the entomological equivalent of a train-spotter, I have so far identified more than seventy bee species, fifty types of butterfly, sixty bird species and well over 100 different flowering plants living in this meadow. This is just a small fraction of the grand total; I have not yet begun to tackle the springtails, mites, worms, spiders, beetles, snails and other creatures that live there, and in all likelihood I will never find time. The vast majority of the creatures that we ignore are small, many so diminutive that they can barely be seen with the naked eye, and others much smaller still. But if you take the trouble to place one of these minute creatures under a microscope you will reveal their precise symmetry and exquisite structure. Each and every one has a different story, a life history; it must find food, grow, evade predators, find and court a mate, lay eggs, and so on. Every step involves challenges, obstacles that must be overcome, and every species has evolved its own unique combinations of strategies to survive and thrive; if it had not, it would long since have disappeared. Even in western Europe, where we have a long tradition of studying natural history, we know almost nothing about the lives of most of these wild creatures.
In
this section I will introduce you to some of the insects and other small animals that live in this meadow, to some of the very few that have been studied at least a little, and to what is known about some of their relatives that live in more exotic climes. I will try to explain some of the fascinating details of their behaviour and ecology, what roles they play in the ecosystem, and my own efforts to encourage more and more species to colonise this little corner of the French countryside. Welcome to the meadow …
CHAPTER ONE
A Stroll in the Meadow
24 April 2007. Morning run 5.8 miles, 42 mins 2 secs. As ever, the French countryside was almost devoid of human life; I saw no people, but was barked at by five dogs, unused to seeing a runner passing by. It was a lovely cool morning, clear blue sky above, thick dew on the grass, cowslips bursting from the hedge banks. Butterfly species seen: 6 – I distract myself from the pain of running by seeing how many I can spot without stopping. I’ve tried this with bumblebees, but they are mostly too tricky to identify at speed. Today’s butterfly haul included a holly blue and a male brimstone, sulphurous wings flashing in the sunshine. I also disturbed a pair of green woodpeckers anting on the lane above the top field, their alarmed yaffle and undulating flight unmistakable. Lesser whitethroats were singing in every copse I passed, a melodic, liquid song; the mating season is clearly in full swing – I can still hear them from all directions as I sit on the patio bench by the front door, dripping sweat on to my notes.
Sixty-five kilometres north-west of Limoges, near the lovely Roman market town of Confolens on the River Vienne, stands an old farmhouse. Roughly halfway down France, going north to south, and about 110 kilometres inland from the west coast, the farmhouse lies in the Charente, a large, sleepy département of rolling countryside, oak forests, rust-coloured Limousin cows, and fields of sunflowers, intersected by the lazy meanders of the Charente River. The house was built perhaps 160 years ago, presumably by a Monsieur Nauche who gave the farm its name, Chez Nauche. There are many grand and beautiful Charentais farmhouses in the region, built of dressed stone three or more storeys high, with ranks of tall windows arranged symmetrically around an imposing central entrance. This is not one of them. At Chez Nauche the thick walls are built from undressed, local limestone, irregular lumps of rock full of fossils and presumably dug from the local fields. The stones are held together with orange clay for mortar, also dug straight from the ground. The walls have shifted since they were built, and now lean at interesting angles. The windows are mostly small and irregularly arranged, with ancient weathered oak beams for lintels and loosely hinged old oak shutters from which the paint has largely peeled. The house is long, low and squat, facing south; the intention was that all accommodation should be on the ground floor, a common design among the more modest farmhouses in the area. The large attic was for hay storage, which provided insulation during the winter for those living below. The floors to the attic are made from thick planks of oak, laid upon massive square oak beams. The timber would mostly have come from local trees, hand-sawn, and indeed the beams still bear the saw-marks. The labour involved in building a house like this must have been Herculean, although the costs of material would have been close to zero.
To produce an oak beam, the practice was simply to find the nearest oak tree with a fairly straight trunk and chop it down. The builders would then dig a pit under the fallen trunk, deep enough for one of them to lie in, and they would saw the trunk into square beams using a huge two-man saw, with one person lying in the pit, his face sprinkled with sawdust, and the other standing on top of the trunk. Finally they would use a horse to drag the beam to the house, and ropes to winch it into position.
The terracotta tiles on the roof are also fired from local clay. They are known as canal or channel tiles, a design that dates back to the Romans, and are laid in alternating rows of gulley and ridge. I doubt that Monsieur Nauche made those himself, since firing them is a bit of a specialist job, so they are probably one of the only major items that he had to buy in, but they would not have come from far away. Otherwise, pretty much the entire building, and its surrounding barns, was constructed from materials that could be gathered for free from the immediate surroundings, and this gives the buildings a natural, organic feel, almost as if they grew up from the ground of their own accord like an eruption of unusual, rectangular mushrooms.
I bought Chez Nauche in 2003, from an old farmer named Monsieur Poupard. So far as I could establish with my feeble grasp of French, he had lived there all his life, keeping dairy cows and growing arable crops. Well into his sixties and with no children to leave the farm to, he had decided to sell up and retire. He had not looked after the old place, allowing it to fall gently into ruin. The roof leaked, so that the internal timbers were slowly rotting, and the old lime plaster was stained black with mould and was peeling from the walls. The window frames were rotten, the glass was cracked and covered with patches of old plastic sheeting, and the front door was rotted away at the base, with old pieces of tin can hammered flat and nailed over the gaps. The plumbing consisted of one old dripping tap above a stone sink – there was no bath, shower or toilet, and the lavatory facilities consisted of a bucket in the shed.
It was, to put it mildly, a doer-upper, but for all its shortcomings it held one huge attraction for me, as a wildlife-obsessed biologist. Monsieur Poupard’s lackadaisical maintenance schedule had allowed the house and its surroundings to be infiltrated by a myriad of creatures. In many modern British houses, house-proud home-owners are horrified if they see a single woodlouse on the carpet, or an ant in the kitchen. This attitude must swiftly be abandoned at Chez Nauche, or a nervous breakdown would inevitably ensue. The house has slowly settled into its environment over the decades, and is swamped and overrun with plants and animals. Although I have made some improvements in the ten years since I bought it, it remains to this day a haven for wildlife. The roof tiles are crusted with orange, black and cream lichens, which are grazed upon by caterpillars. Mosses grow in the gullies between the tiles, particularly on the north side of the house, and millipedes, woodlice, water bears1 and numerous other small insects live amongst the damp green cushions. The walls are also encrusted with lichens, and are smothered under the lush foliage of the grape vines that cling to rusting metal brackets along the wall. When the sun shines, as it often does, these walls are a popular basking spot for butterflies, bees and flies, warming themselves before going off to look for a mate or nectar to drink. These insects are hunted by zebra-striped jumping spiders and mottled brown-and-green wall lizards, agile creatures with long, clawed toes that scurry impossibly quickly over the vertical masonry, dashing into holes in the soft clay mortar at the first sign of danger. Most of the insects are too quick to be caught, especially if they have managed to keep warm and ready for take-off, but once in the air they run the gauntlet of the swallows that nest in the barns and swoop low past the house. From the base of the wall at the front of the house sprout old lavender bushes, their twisted, woody stems sagging under the weight of purple blossom in summer, alive with bumblebees, butterflies and the blurred wings of hovering hummingbird hawkmoths, their long crooked tongues reaching down into the nectaries of the flowers.
An old cobbled path runs to the front door, and the cracks between the stones are inhabited by bulbous-headed black crickets, the males singing cheerfully and incessantly to attract a mate. The lizards and young western whip snakes also make use of the holes amongst the warm stones, hunting there for beetles and spiders. In front of the house is a stooped and gnarled selection of ancient nectarine and plum trees, with bracket fungi sprouting from some branches, and chubby green caterpillars of the scarce swallowtail grazing on their leaves. Great green bush crickets perch on the branches, the males rasping out their incessant chainsaw-buzz in an attempt to drown out the black crickets down below.
Inside the house, where it is cool and dark and the buzz of the crickets is just a distant hum, crepuscular creatures abound. Spiders of numerous
species spin their webs amongst the ancient beams; spindly daddy-long-legs spiders spin irregular, shoddy webs from which they dangle upside-down, while giant Tegenaria house spiders prefer to make close-woven, funnel-shaped webs leading to a deep hole in which they can hide. The beams themselves are tunnelled by the fat white grubs of long-horn and death-watch beetles, and also by woodworm (not a worm, but a tiny beetle). Under the furniture and in the kitchen cupboards lurk satin-black darkling beetles, ponderously slow but heavily armoured, so they have no need for speed.
At night, the mice take over; on the floor, house mice scurry, with the occasional larger, huge-eyed wood mouse. They search for scraps of human food, tasty spiders or day-flying insects that have blundered into the house and become trapped. On the walls and beams, dormice scamper: garden dormice, with delicate racoon-like facial markings and a long tail ending in a fluffy tip; and the scarcer edible dormice, favoured as a delicacy by the Romans. Endearing to look at they may be, but the garden dormice are aggressive little beasts, churring at each other through the night, and they often wake me with their rumbustious skirmishes. Because of the nuisance they make of themselves, I have trapped many dozens of them; they are absolute suckers for Cantal, a hard and pungent cheese from the mountains of the Auvergne – it gets them every time. When my eldest boys Finn and Jedd – at the time about seven and five years old – first saw one of these garden dormice, growling angrily at them from the trap and gnawing at the mesh to escape, they rushed to wake me up with the news: ‘Daddy, come quick, we’ve caught a tiny demon!’ It did look pretty ferocious – the poor thing had rubbed its nose red-raw trying to get out. I always release the little demons far away from the house, having given them a good feed, but my efforts never seem to make any dent in the population. The edible dormice seem to be much gentler, with a beautifully thick fluffy tail; they are so large as to be easily mistaken for small, exceedingly cute squirrels. I cannot bring myself to evict them from the house.
