Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Dave Goulson

Dedication

Title Page

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

Acknowledgements

Index

Copyright

A Buzz in the Meadow

Dave Goulson

About the Book

In A Buzz in the Meadow Goulson tells the story of how he bought a derelict farm in the heart of rural France, together with 33 acres of surrounding meadow and how, over a decade, he has created a place for his beloved bumblebees to thrive. But other creatures live there too, myriad insects of every kind, many of them ones that Goulson has studied before in his career as a biologist. You will learn about how a deathwatch beetle finds its mate, about the importance of houseflies, why butterflies have spots on their wings, about dragonfly sex, bedbugs and wasps. Goulson is brilliant, and very funny, at showing how scientists actually conduct experiments.

The book is also a wake-up call, urging us to cherish and protect life on earth in all its forms. Goulson has that rare ability to persuade you to go out into your garden or local park and get down on your hands and knees and look. The undiscovered glory that is life on planet Earth is there to be discovered. And if we learn to value what we have, perhaps we will find a way to keep it.

A Sting in the Tale, Dave Goulson’s account of a lifetime studying bumblebees, was brilliantly reviewed and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for the best non-fiction book of 2013. A Buzz in the Meadow is another call to arms for nature lovers everywhere.

About the Author

Dave Goulson studied biology at Oxford University and is now Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Sussex. He founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust in 2006. A Sting in the Tale was published by Jonathan Cape in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

ALSO BY DAVE GOULSON

A Sting in the Tale

PART I

Tales from the Meadow

WE INHABIT A spherical rock, just 13,000 kilometres 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 bears^fn1 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.

The various mice are nervous, for barn owls roost in the attic, leaving huge piles of pellets, which are consumed by the grubs of clothes and skin moths, species adapted to feeding on the desiccated remains of animals. There is also another, mysterious beast that they should fear. Some years ago I installed some Velux windows in the old roof, and soon afterwards noted the footprints of a largish animal on the glass. I also found pungent, elongated scats, sometimes on the drive to the house, and once on an inside windowsill. Whatever this beast was, it could take on formidable prey; on one occasion I found a wing and the head of one of my barn owls strewn in the attic. On another occasion, when on an early-morning excursion, my young boys found a bleeding chunk of flesh on the drive, all that remained of a large whip snake. From its width I would guess the snake had been a good one and a half metres or more long, but everything had been consumed, apart from a fifteen-centimetre section of its midriff. The beast took on a mythical status in the family, with the children speculating wildly as to what it might be, and it was many years before I finally worked out what it was.

Let me take you for a stroll. We’ll start at the top of the drive, to the north of the house, by the big horse-chestnut tree. It is late afternoon, towards the end of May, and the tree is in full bloom, the cones of frothy cream flowers attracting scores of bumblebees, whose bustling dislodges petals from the older flowers that rain down upon the drive. We amble down the old tarmac drive, its warm surface cracked by tree roots pushing through from beneath, sparse tufts of crested dogstail grass sprouting from the crevices. On the left we stop to admire the wood-ant nest, a gentle dome of cut, dried grass stems thronging with large chestnut-coloured ants. The nest has been in the same place for ten years now, to my knowledge. My boys love to watch and poke the ants, and occasionally, I suspect, they throw them insect prey. The slightest disturbance causes ripples of activity to spread across the nest as the ants release alarm pheromones warning of danger. The ant trails radiate from the nest across the tarmac, with incoming ants carrying all sorts of fragments of plants and insects to feed to their brood in the nest.

Beyond the ants’ nest on our left is a thick hedge of gorse, five metres or more across. A male stonechat perches on the highest point, his trademark call sounding very much like two dry pebbles being struck together. The female is no doubt sitting on her cup-shaped mossy nest somewhere deep in the gorse thicket, incubating her clutch of sky-blue eggs. Peering through the thick gorse hedge, to the east of the drive we can just see my orchard: fifty well-spaced young apple trees that I grew from pips. The largest are now nearly four metres tall, and two of the trees bore fruit for the first time last year. My three boys are chasing butterflies fifty metres away amongst the trees, the two eldest, Finn and Jedd (now aged twelve and ten) leading the way through the long grass, chattering excitedly, each armed with a huge kite net. Behind them our youngest, Seth (aged three), is gamely battling to keep up, his white-blond shock of hair all that is visible of him amongst the greenery.

On our right I point out a bee orchid, its single purple flower mimicking the smell and texture of a female bee and thus luring male bees to attempt to copulate with it. All they get for their trouble is a ball of pollen glued to their heads, but they must be foolish enough to make the same mistake again or the bee orchid’s strategy would not work.

Further down, the drive is shaded by a line of large oaks on the right, and a mix of elm and oak on the left. Brittle brown acorns from last autumn still litter the ground. The elms are repeatedly attacked by Dutch elm disease, which quickly kills the trees once they reach six or seven metres in height, but luckily the trees spread rapidly by suckers, so there is a constant crop of new saplings coming up. A territorial male speckled wood butterfly dashes up from a warm sunspot on the drive to chase away a brimstone that has dared to enter its domain.

I love the French names for butterflies, compared to which many of the English names are a little unimaginative; for example the English orange tip is simply descriptive, while the French l’aurore – the dawn – is rather more poetic. What do we call a speckled butterfly that lives in woods? The speckled wood, of course, while to the French it is le Tircis, named after a shepherd in a seventeenth-century fable by Jean de La Fontaine. A few years ago I hit upon the idea of organising a guided butterfly walk at Chez Nauche for any interested locals. I sent posters advertising the walk to the mayor of Épenède, the local village, and also to the mayor of nearby Pleuville, asking for them to be displayed on the village noticeboard. I bought lots of lemonade for my visitors, and boned up on all the French names of butterflies and other insects, although I was somewhat worried that my inability to say much else in coherent French might be a handicap. On the day of the event I waited nervously outside the house, but no one arrived at the allotted time. Ten minutes late a car at last drew up; an English lady, and her young daughter, who lived nearby. I had not met them before, but was happy to take them for a walk in the meadow, though also a little disappointed by the turnout of the French contingent. Perhaps chasing butterflies is an eccentric English activity, and not something that appeals to French country-dwellers. It is certainly true that membership of conservation charities such as the RSPB and Butterfly Conservation is far higher in the UK than in any other country in the world. We had a pleasant walk, spotting bumblebees, butterflies and grasshoppers. Towards the end of the walk I took us past an old piece of corrugated tin that I had laid out on the edge of the field. Snakes love to bask under tin sheeting, and I had a pretty good idea that there would be something dramatic underneath, to form the perfect finale to the walk. Sure enough, there was a sizeable Aesculapian snake underneath, which I managed to grab with a flourish. We walked back to the car so that the mother could take a photo of her daughter stroking the snake, and finally we let it go. I hadn’t quite anticipated what happened next. The snake shot under their car, then climbed up into the still-warm engine. We spent the next hour with the bonnet up, trying to find it – without success. In the end the poor lady and her daughter had to drive away reluctantly with a snake somewhere in their car. I very much hope they all survived the journey.

Returning to our stroll, we are coming towards the end of the drive. On our left is a rectangle of stout walls – the Alamo, as my father has christened it – all that remains of a very large barn. When I bought Chez Nauche this barn was in a terrible state, with gaping holes in the roof and the beautiful old oak frames well rotted. I couldn’t afford to repair it, so I took the roof off and sold the remaining half-decent timbers to a reclamation yard. The old walls provide a suntrap for lizards and warmth-loving butterflies; teasels and thistles sprout up in profusion from the stony ground; and whip snakes are common amongst the stones and weeds.

On our right is a small hollow, overgrown with blackthorn and ash, once a shallow seasonal pond, which I mistakenly filled in with building rubble. I have since been slowly clearing it out, in the hope that the newts that once lived there will return.

Let us strike right off the drive, past the pond and across the open meadow. This western side of the meadow is where I have set up a large, long-running experiment to try to increase the numbers of flowers. I sowed squares of meadow with yellow rattle, eyebright, bartsia and meadow cow-wheat, all partially parasitic plants that sap the strength from nearby grasses by tapping into their roots and sucking up nutrients. Suppressing the grasses leaves a little more room for other flowers, or so the theory goes. The rattle is in full flower: a pretty annual with small yellow flowers tipped in purple, which has established itself in little clumps across the experimental plots. It is too early to say whether this has increased the number of flowers, but in any case the meadow looks pretty good at this time of year. After ten years without any fertilisers or pesticides, quite a lot of wild flowers have established themselves. The main grasses are cocksfoot, Yorkshire fog and false oat grass, large and dominant species that tend to smother all else, but over time they have been declining and have been partly replaced by the finer, less aggressive grasses typical of a proper hay meadow: fescues, sweet vernal grass and meadow foxtail. Amongst the grasses, some flowers have become common: wild geraniums, forget-me-nots, ragwort, white campions, hawkbit, clover and meddicks, to name but a few. Some of them tend to occur in distinct patches, either because their seeds do not spread readily or perhaps because some subtle variations in the soil properties suit them better in some places than others.

As soon as we leave the drive we enter a patch thick with cinquefoil, a low-growing, prostrate relative of the rose, with simple yellow flowers, much like those a child might draw. Its creeping, horizontal stems snag our feet as we walk through. Five metres later the cinquefoil ends abruptly, and we encounter a dense clump of meadow vetchling, a pea with twining tendrils with which it clambers up the taller grass stems. Amongst the close vegetation we hear the high-pitched shrieks of shrews fighting; these tiny but voracious predators live their short lives at a hectic pace, eating constantly and fiercely defending their territory against one another. After the vetchling, a dense patch of red clover is thick with long-tongued bumblebees, garden bumblebees and common carder bumblebees, gathering its protein-rich, toffee-coloured pollen and sweet nectar. Then we move into a dense sward of lady’s bedstraw, a fragrant spreading plant with tiny, dark-green leaves and heads of abundant but minuscule yellow flowers. In days gone by, before comfy sprung mattresses, it was used as sweet-smelling bedding – whence, of course, it gains its name.

We are walking south-west, down a gently increasing slope, with the old farm buildings of the tiny hamlet of Villemiers visible on the other side of the valley a kilometre away. The Transon meanders in the bottom of the valley below, a lazy trickle of a stream with small muddy pools at intervals, home to numerous coypu, a South American rodent that escaped from fur-farms long ago and has found a home-from-home in the many rivers and lakes of the Charente. They are semi-aquatic, resembling beavers in all but their long, rat-like tails. They can be something of a nuisance, as they are great burrowers, creating huge holes in the banks just on the waterline, which does little harm in a stream, but can be disastrous in a man-made lake, since their burrows can puncture the dam.^fn2

Away to our left, the plaintive cry of the wack-wack bird can be heard in the distance. My boys and I have spent many hours trying to stalk this beast, which I have only ever heard at Chez Nauche. It calls most days in spring and summer, usually from the south-east, a nasal wack, wack with a distinct but brief pause between the notes. There only ever seems to be one of them. Whenever I try to do an impression of it to my knowledgeable ornithological friends, they laugh and tell me it is a duck, but that is simply my inability to replicate the noise. We have crept towards the source of the noise through the long grass of the meadow. It usually sounds as if it is coming from a large oak tree on the boundary, but whenever we get close it ceases to call, and we see nothing fly away. The boys speculate that it is some dramatic creature, brightly coloured and a metre or so tall, with a crest and a long sharp beak, but if so, it must be very good at hiding. I wonder whether it may not be a bird at all, but some peculiar species of frog. Perhaps one day we will find out.

The meadow becomes drier as we continue on to the steep south-facing slope at the southern end, and ribwort plantain becomes common underfoot. This is an unspectacular little plant, with strapline leaves and inconspicuous brown flowers from which dangles a fringe of yellow anthers, but the leaves are the favoured food plant of the lovely Glanville fritillary. This butterfly is named after Lady Eleanor Glanville, one of the very few female lepidopterists of the eighteenth century. She first described this pretty species, which she found near her home in Lincolnshire. Glanville fritillaries have long since disappeared from most of the UK; they are now found only on the south coast of the Isle of Wight, but it is one of the most common butterflies at this time of year at Chez Nauche, and we disturb dozens from the grass as we walk. They have an orange-and-black chequerboard upper side to their wings, their creamy underside being streaked attractively with orange and dotted with black spots. Their bodies are furry, giving them a rather cuddly appearance. I bred Glanville fritillaries in my bedroom as a child, after buying the pupae from Worldwide Butterflies, and I have always been rather attached to this species. The caterpillars are unusual in that they are gregarious; the female lays large mounds of yellow eggs, which hatch into velvet-black caterpillars, which live together on plantain in silken webs that they spin. Once they have consumed the plant on which they are laid, they somehow agree that it is time to depart and set off in a convoy to the next one.

We are approaching a deep-sunk green lane that marks the western boundary of the meadow. A dense stand of oak, hazel and blackthorn lines both sides of the lane. We push through a slight gap in the hedge, our legs getting scratched by the terrifically spiky butcher’s broom that thrives on the hedge bank. In the lane it is shady and sheltered; on hot days flies congregate here to escape the heat. I have brought us through to see the wood whites, delicate, ghostly-white butterflies that patrol slowly up and down the lane, their flight so weak it seems they may expire at any moment. This is another species that is in precipitous decline in the UK for reasons that are not well understood, but here they seem to be flourishing. We turn left down the lane, continuing steeply downhill to the Transon, a stream that is just beyond my land. There is a small pool before it gurgles under the lane, and a swarm of shiny whirligig beetles gyrates crazily on the surface. I’ve often seen grass snakes hunting fish and tadpoles in the shallows here, but there isn’t one today. Just as we turn to retrace our steps a male demoiselle flits by, its metallic blue body glinting in the sunlight. This is the king of damselflies, larger than other European species and by some margin the most spectacular. Aside from the male’s iridescent body, its wings are decorated with large splashes of blue-black pigment, so that they flash with every wingbeat. The females are a slightly more understated iridescent green, and a pair sitting together, as they often do, is a breathtaking sight.

We walk a little way back up the hill and cut back through the hedge into the south corner of my meadow. We climb up a steep slope, heading north-east, towards a small tree standing in isolation. It is a walnut that I planted there some six years ago, now grown to about three metres in height. One day it will be large enough to make a splendid shady picnic spot, and perhaps also provide walnuts to eat. On the slender grey trunk there is a praying mantis, newly adult, its triangular head following our every movement, as if sizing us up as potential prey. In green vegetation praying mantises are nearly impossible to spot, but this one has chosen the wrong place to perch. Its powerful forelegs are folded beneath it, their rows of sharp spines locked together, poised to strike out in the blink of an eye, should an insect be foolish enough to come too close. If attacked by a bird, the mantis can flash its wings open, revealing large eye-spots, designed to frighten into retreat all but the boldest bird.^fn3

Just beyond the walnut is a gentle hollow perhaps twenty metres across. Here the grass is thick with wild basil, thyme and mint, which create a heady aroma. Sitting down, you cannot be seen from anywhere; it is a wonderful place to relax and soak up the sights, smells and sounds of the meadow. A male stag beetle drones past; they are common at this time of year. These huge beetles are clumsy fliers, encumbered as they are with massive jaws for wrestling with rivals for a mate. They are so slow that it is easy to snatch them out of the air, but I leave this one be.

From here we head east, the meadow falling away again into a gentle valley, at the bottom of which is a small spring. The spring was once the main water supply to the farm. French water is metered and amongst the most expensive in the world, so Monsieur Poupard used to pump all of his water up from the spring to a rusty old tank in one of the small barns, thereby avoiding having to pay for it. A well has been dug into the ground, lined with stones, and from this a trickle of water runs south towards the Transon. I have allowed scrub to establish around the spring, mainly blackthorn and brambles, which provide a glorious impene-trable tangle in which many birds nest. Slightly downstream I planted yellow flag irises, which have taken well and sprout their waxy leaves and stems well above the encroaching brambles, their flamboyant flowers a draw to bumblebees.

Beyond the irises we come to a pond held back by a clumsy stone-and-clay dam, my attempt to create more habitat for aquatic wildlife, of which I will tell you more later. We walk across the top of the dam and up the other side of the valley, still heading east. On our right, the boundary is marked by huge mature oaks, alive with the bubbling, liquid song of whitethroats. When we reach the top of the hill we are near my eastern boundary. We sit down, looking back over the valley and the spring, to the cluster of ochre buildings that make up Chez Nauche, casting long shadows towards us as the sun falls behind them to the western horizon. A swallowtail butterfly soars past, the first of the year, a magnificent yellow-and-black creature, the hindwings of which are decorated with blue-and-red eye-spots and long streamers. It is a male, searching eagerly for a newly emerging female with which to mate. The crickets, which fell silent as we approached, edge back to the mouths of their burrows and recommence their singing. Summer is near, and for insects this is the time for sex and nectar, sunshine and flowers. It is my favourite time of year, and my favourite place, where nature runs riot and all is right with the world. Well, almost. If only I’d remembered to bring a couple of cold beers. And perhaps a nip of cheese.

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^fn1 It is quite likely that you have never heard of water bears, also known as moss piglets or, more properly, as tardigrades. These tiny, eight-legged creatures, which rarely exceed one millimetre in length, are amongst the hardiest animals on Earth. They can survive a decade without water, being cooled to -273°C, heated to 150°C, crushed at 6,000 atmospheres pressure or exposed to 1,000 times more radiation than would kill a human. I have absolutely no idea why scientists have taken it upon themselves to try so hard to kill these innocuous little creatures.

^fn2 The UK also used to have escapee coypu in East Anglia, accidentally introduced in the 1920s. They caused havoc by burrowing through the banks of the many drainage ditches and canals in this very flat part of the UK, often causing fields to flood. In 1989 I met a scientist who had recently taken a job at the MAFF-funded coypu control centre at a time when, although no one had yet realised it, coypu had already been successfully exterminated; the last one was seen in Norfolk in 1988.

^fn3 Due perhaps to their large size and striking appearance, mantises have long been associated with all sorts of odd beliefs. In North America it was commonly held that they could blind men and kill horses. The French regarded them as more benign, believing that they would point the way home to lost children, while in parts of Africa they are thought to bring good luck and occasionally resurrect the dead. Not bad for an insect that is but one step removed from a cockroach (they are close relatives).

CHAPTER TWO

The Insect Empire

27 JULY 2007. Run: 41 mins 15 secs. It is another beautiful day in paradise. People: one old man delivering bread from his white Citroën van in Épenède. Dogs: 8 – a personal record, including a huge Pyrenean mountain dog in Le Breuil, with a bark that made the earth shake. Fortunately it seemed friendly. Butterfly species: 16. Black-veined white butterflies are plentiful this year, braving the spiky flowers of teasels along the drive to gorge on the rich nectar; for mysterious reasons, this butterfly species died out in the UK more than 100 years ago. As I sit, getting my breath back, I can see a Montagu’s harrier hawking above the newly cut top meadow, hunting for voles – a magnificent, graceful, but angular bird with slate-grey, black-tipped wings.

Half a billion years ago, give or take, a slow revolution began. On the muddy floor of an ancient ocean, a selection of weird and wonderful creatures began their bid to take over the world. Most of them looked little like any of today’s living creatures. They had segmented bodies equipped with a varying array of tentacles, claws, spines, eyes and numerous other odd appendages, the purpose of which we will almost certainly never understand. We would not know about these wonderful, long-dead creatures were it not for the diligence of one Charles Walcott, a fossil-hunter and geologist who, late in his life in 1909, stumbled upon a huge selection of beautifully preserved fossils from this era high in the Canadian Rockies. The rock formation, now known as the Burgess Shale, was formed from layers of soft silt that had settled on the ocean floor, trapping and preserving in extraordinary detail the bodies of the creatures that lived there. We still don’t know why the fossils here were preserved so well; it may have been that an area of the ocean floor was anoxic, so that creatures entering it suffocated and were preserved by the lack of oxygen, or it may have been that a series of sudden mud-slides trapped and preserved these hapless creatures. Whatever the reason, the Burgess Shale provides a remarkable picture of a primordial world.

Walcott spent the last years of his life in repeated trips to the Burgess Shale, and in attempting to identify and classify the fossils he collected. Most of the primitive animals that he described he assigned to one group, the arthropods (meaning ‘jointed feet’). This is the group that today comprises crustaceans, arachnids and the insects. All arthropods have a segmented exoskeleton, a rigid, articulated suit of armour, usually equipped with an array of jointed limbs. They have been compared to Swiss-army knives; their limbs can each be specialised for different functions: walking, swimming, grabbing, stabbing, mating, breathing, flying, weaving and so on. Just like the army knife, these limbs often fold neatly away when not in use.

Among the arthropods in the Burgess Shale were crustacean-like creatures, relatives of the crabs, lobsters, krill, shrimps, barnacles and copepods that abound in the seas to this day. There were many other creatures too, ones that were hard to classify into familiar arthropod groups and presumably belonged to lineages that did not survive the intervening eons to the present day. There was Opabinia, which appeared to have five eyes and a downcurved trunk like that of a minature elephant; and Hallucigenia, a surpassingly strange creature a little reminiscent of a cross between a worm and a hedgehog, with numerous legs and paired sharp spines. When this was first described, it was thought to walk on its spines, with its tentacle-like legs waving above it. It has now been flipped over and is portrayed with its spines on top, presumably as a form of defence, although we will never know for sure. One of the larger genera, named Animalocaris, was frequently preserved in fragments, perhaps because its body easily broke apart after death, and its different body parts were originally classified as three different animals, until a whole specimen was eventually discovered.^fn1

Since the discovery of the Burgess Shale, other similar fossil beds from about the same period have been found elsewhere in the world, although arguably none quite so fine. These have added to our knowledge of life in the Cambrian seas half a billion years ago – 499 million years before something approximating to modern humans was to appear. In addition to Walcott’s strange creatures there were arachnids, ancestors of modern spiders and ticks, including the fearsome eurypterids, scorpion-like creatures up to two and a half metres long, which used powerful pincers to hunt their prey on the beds of oceans and rivers. There were trilobites, segmented, shield-shaped animals known to us now only from fossils, but for 250 million years they were amongst the most abundant creatures on Earth, with many thousands of species, from tiny free-swimming versions thought to have lived in open water to vast, armoured bulldozers that trundled along the ocean floor, presumably trying to keep out of the way of the eurypterids.

One arthropod group that is conspicuously absent from the fossils of the Cambrian is the insects, but that would have been no surprise to Walcott, for the insects did not evolve in the seas; they evolved later, on land. At the time the Burgess Shale was laid down, life on land was pretty unexciting – there were a few primitive clubmosses and liverworts growing in wet areas near water, but little else. There would also have been a strand-line of washed-up plants and animals, edible detritus that was tantalisingly out of reach of the water-bound animals of the day. Inevitably, before long some arthropods began to drag themselves ashore to take advantage of these untapped resources. Their external skeletons, which perhaps originally evolved as a defence against predators, helped to support their bodies on land, giving them an edge in colonisation there over soft-bodied sea animals such as jellyfish and worms. To start with, these animals would presumably have been poorly waterproofed and had to return to water very regularly to prevent themselves drying out; or they would have had to stay in the dampest places, amongst rotting weed or damp moss.

We will probably never know what the first land animal looked like; it may have been something like a millipede, which grazed on the carpets of moss on the sea shores. It may have been a crustacean, perhaps similar to a woodlouse or sandhopper, feeding on rotting detritus along the high-tide line. Whatever it was, it was soon followed by predatory arachnids, scorpion-like creatures that trundled or scurried after their prey across the greenery. As the plants slowly adapted to life on land and spread away from the seas, they also grew taller as the competition for light intensified. To follow them, the animals had to improve their waterproofing. Some animal groups never really got the hang of this; for example, the few crustaceans that successfully invaded land, such as woodlice, are restricted to damp places to this day. Others, such as arachnids, evolved more-or-less waterproof cuticles and eggs, so that they were able to leave water far behind and occupy even the most inhospitable, arid environments on Earth.

The insects were the last of the major arthropod groups to arrive, about 400 million years ago, but they have more than made up for lost time since then. We do not know what they evolved from – perhaps it was the crustaceans, perhaps some early millipede-like creature. It is most likely that they evolved on land rather than in the sea like the others, and they have become the masters of terrestrial life.

Along with the spiders, insects mastered waterproofing early on; their cuticle is coated in waxes and oils that cut water loss to a minimum. Insects differ from other arthropods in having fewer legs – just six. Their body is divided into three distinct sections: the head, which carries the sensory organs: eyes, antennae, palps, and so on; the thorax, to which all the limbs are attached; and the abdomen, which contains the reproductive parts. The earliest insects were not particularly impressive. They were probably similar to the silverfish that survive to this day: small, scurrying creatures that live in damp places, notably under carpets in poorly maintained houses, presumably not their original habitat. Somewhere along the line these early insects acquired better waterproofing and, with that, the terrestrial world was their oyster. They proliferated, exploiting the abundant food provided by the spreading forests and specialising into a myriad of forms. By the Carboniferous period about 360 million years ago, there were numerous types of cockroach, mantis, grasshopper and probably many others; insects rarely fossilise, so we have only a very fragmented picture. These insects provided abundant food for the predatory and parasitic arachnids, and they too thrived and became better adapted to life on land, so that the Carboniferous was blessed with the first spiders, and also with bloodsucking ticks, scavenging harvestmen and mites, and various other horrendously unattractive but eerily fascinating creatures, such as whip scorpions and vinegaroons, which have survived to the present.

The insects were to prove to have a couple of other tricks up their sleeve – two more evolutionary innovations that would leave the rest of the animal kingdom far behind. Perhaps most importantly, they were the first creatures on Earth to take to the air, to evolve powered flight, perhaps 350 million years ago. The earliest flying insects included grasshoppers and cockroaches, but these are not accomplished fliers. Even today, most species can only fly a few metres at most before they crash to the ground. The first true masters of the air were the dragonflies, swift and agile in flight. This must have given them huge advantages over earth-bound animals. They could swoop down on their prey from above and easily escape from predators such as amphibians. They could swiftly travel long distances to find food, or flee from approaching winter by migrating southwards. Colonising new habitats as they appeared would have been easy, and so it was flying insects that would always have been among the first to arrive as new islands arose from the oceans, and the first to colonise new ponds and lakes as they formed.

The final major innovation of the insects was the evolution of metamorphosis. Primitive insects do not change much as they grow, other than in getting bigger. The eggs hatch into miniature copies of the adults called nymphs, and these grow gradually larger by moulting. This is much the same as all the other arthropods, such as shrimps and spiders. Even today, many insects develop in this way: grasshoppers and crickets, earwigs, aphids and cockroaches, to name a few. Just a small number of insect groups undergo metamorphosis. In these, the eggs hatch into a grub or caterpillar, properly known as a larva, which looks nothing whatsoever like its parent. It is an eating machine, a mouth and digestive system contained within a flabby sac, designed for growth. It is usually not very mobile, has poor eyesight and generally weak senses. Most larvae rely on having been placed on or in a supply of food by their mother, and their job is to convert that food into insect tissue as quickly as possible. Once this job is done, the larva pupates, shedding its skin and turning into an immobile, helpless chrysalis or pupa. Inside the pupa, the tissues dissolve and are rebuilt from scratch. Wings form, and legs, eyes, antennae, a brain – all the body parts of the adult – are assembled. Once this is done, the adult bursts forth from the pupa, pumps up its wings to full size and is ready for action.