A Buzz in the Meadow Page 4
In the minds of many, conservation is all about giant pandas, ospreys, tigers, rhinos and blue whales: large, charismatic, furry or feathery creatures, often living on the other side of the world, glimpsed only in television documentaries. What few people appreciate is that the vast majority of life on Earth, in terms of both numbers of species and numbers of individuals, is made up of insects and other arthropods, and that many of them are just as important, fascinating and worthy of our interest and of conservation as the larger creatures. Indeed, whilst the extinction of the giant panda would be terribly sad, it would not have any knock-on consequences. There would perhaps be a tiny bit more bamboo in a forest in China. In contrast, the little creatures that live all around us are absolutely vital to our survival and well-being, yet we generally pay them little heed unless they annoy us.
The various flowers in my meadow need bees, hoverflies, butterflies and beetles to pollinate them, and many of those same insects fly out of the meadow to pollinate the sunflowers in the neighbouring fields and the peaches, apples and tomatoes in my small garden by the house. The wild flowers and my vegetables also need a healthy soil in which to grow, and so depend upon the springtails, woodlice, worms and millipedes that live in it, recycling nutrients and aerating the soil. Without predators such as ladybirds, lacewings and rove beetles, and parasitoids such as many small types of wasps and flies, herbivorous insects would run amok, wiping out their preferred host plants and destroying the ecological balance of the meadow. Without grasshoppers, flies, crickets and moths, the birds and bats would have no food. Ugly or beautiful, it is the little creatures that make the world go round. We should celebrate and appreciate them in all their wonderful diversity.
CHAPTER THREE
Chez les Newts
3 September 2007. Run: 41 mins 31 secs. My legs felt heavy today, I must reduce my nightly cheese intake! People: none. Dogs: 3. Butterfly species: 9 – a poor haul; the insect year is drawing to a close. An unseasonably late glow-worm was casting her magical green light on the patio here last night, but I can’t see her here now. It is hard to believe that these little snail-eating beetles have evolved to culture phosphorescent bacteria in their bottoms as a means to attract a mate – there must be an easier way! Great year for fruit; I snatched huge, glistening blackberries from the hedgerows as I ran – my fingers are purple from the juice – and my decrepit, lichen-encrusted peach trees in front of the house are for once laden with aromatic, golden fruit.
Amphibians and I have something of a history. If you happen to have read A Sting in the Tale you may recall the unfortunate fate of my frostbitten Chinese painted quails, and the accidental electrocution of my tropical fish. My childhood misadventures with my menagerie of pets also resulted in the demise of various amphibians, some of which haunt me to this day. And so it is perhaps just as well (at least for the amphibians) that I chose to focus my adult career on insects.
From a very young age I kept newts and common toads in tanks in my bedroom, and this went atypically well. The toads in particular made great pets, seemingly taking to captivity and providing great entertainment by hoovering up mealworms with their extending, sticky tongues. When I grew bored of them, or ran out of mealworms from the supply that I bred in a box under my bed, I could simply release the toads back into the garden. However, I longed to have some more exotic amphibians, and eventually I badgered my parents into buying me a pair of North American leopard frogs for Christmas: attractive, bright-green frogs with (as you might guess from the name) a profusion of black spots. I filled one of my glass fish tanks with piles of stones, peat, some plants and a small pond, to make an attractive home for them. It looked great and the frogs settled in well, but after just a few weeks their energetic hopping about caused one of the piles of stones to topple; I came home from school one day to find them both squashed.
Undeterred, a year or so later I saved up my pocket money and bought an axolotl. It was a bizarre and wonderful creature. Axolotls are effectively giant tadpoles, reaching sexual maturity while still having the external fluffy gills and purely aquatic habit normally associated with the immature stage of newts and salamanders. They are found in the wild near Mexico City, although they are now critically endangered because of pollution and urban development. Fortunately there are plenty in captivity, particularly in labs, where they are kept to study their unusual ability to regenerate lost limbs. I had a large tank half-filled with water in which three baby red-eared terrapins lived, and I thought this would be perfect for the axolotl. It was both larger and faster than the endearing little terrapins, so it did not occur to me that they would do it any harm. I released the axolotl into the tank, watched them all swimming around for a little while – all seemed peaceable enough – and went to have my tea. I came back a while later to inspect my new pet, only to find that it had been consumed almost entirely by the terrapins, which turned out to be far more ferocious than their appearance suggested. The three of them had hauled themselves out on to a rock under their heat lamp to digest their huge meal, and only the head and some of the spine of the axolotl remained – it was clearly not going to be regenerating. I was distraught, and feel awful to this day when I remember the incident.
In my early teens I acquired two young Argentinian horned toads: fabulously devilish-looking beasts, multicoloured in green, orange and black splodges, with capacious mouths. When fully grown, they can reach nearly thirty centimetres in length and are said to be able to swallow a rat. They thrived for a while, until one swallowed the other. I found the pair of them dead, the aggressor having presumably choked on its meal, with the feet of the victim still protruding from its mouth.
Undeterred, I tried keeping a White’s tree frog. This was a charming little creature, turquoise-blue with huge, sticky fingertips. Unfortunately I did not appreciate the need to add a calcium supplement to its diet of insects, and it developed rickets; its leg bones became flexible, so that it had difficulty hopping. I quickly purchased some calcium and started sprinkling it on the frog’s food, but its limbs hardened in deformed shapes. Nonetheless the frog survived and managed to get about, albeit somewhat awkwardly. It lived for a while, until one day I must have left the lid to its tank slightly ajar and it somehow squeezed out. I searched high and low for it, but to no avail. It was nearly two years later that I found the hapless creature in the tip of an old pair of trainers, where it had clearly decided to hide. It had presumably died of dehydration (or perhaps the smell), and its body had mummified.
That was my last attempt to keep amphibians as pets – clearly they were too tricky for someone as incompetent as me to look after. Sadly, as we shall see, this was not the last time I was to accidentally inflict misfortune on these fascinating creatures.
In the late summer of 2003, a few months after taking over ownership of Chez Nauche, I took a party of twelve students from the University of Southampton down there to blitz the renovations. There was a daunting amount to do on the old place to make it even remotely habitable, and having a small army of volunteers seemed like a good idea. In exchange for two weeks’ labour I offered to pay for their travel costs and provide them with as much food and cheap red wine as they could consume (rather a lot, as it turned out). It was an ill-thought-out plan, for only one of them had any building experience; and I had not anticipated the difficulties in coordinating and overseeing the activities of a gang of novices armed with power tools when I myself had little idea what I was doing. It is a small wonder there was anything at all left of the old place by the time we had finished, and even more surprising there were no major injuries.
On the first day I divided the students up into work parties. One gang demolished a section of old leaky roof, hurling down the broken clay tiles while perched like monkeys on the old, rotting roof timbers. A second group knocked out the rotten windows and door frames, so that there was soon broken glass all over the floor, while a third party set to demolishing some internal walls. I ran around like a headless chicken trying to gi
ve advice and avoid catastrophes. The old building echoed to the sound of crashing tiles, the thump of sledgehammers and the ear-splitting whine of the angle-grinder. To my considerable dismay, in all the chaos a lovely old ceramic sink and some ancient wooden-framed classroom slates that I had found in the loft were smashed. If there is a French equivalent of English Heritage, they would have been horrified to see what was going on. On the other hand, progress was pretty rapid, and great piles of broken tiles, old bricks and rotten window frames began to accumulate along the front of the house. It was hot work, and the rust-red dust stuck to our sweaty skin, so that we were soon utterly filthy.
There was a rough, dry hollow near the edge of the drive, some thirty metres uphill from the house, and it seemed like the perfect place to dispose of all the waste. We shovelled the rubbish into a wheelbarrow, pushed each load laboriously up the hill and tipped it into the hollow with a clatter of dust, and slowly the hollow disappeared. This was something that I was eventually to regret, for it had not occurred to me that this hollow might not always be dry.
At the end of each day we took it in turns to shower around the back of the barn, dousing ourselves in icy-cold water from a hose that I had rigged up. It was glorious standing naked in the long grass, washing off the fine red dust in the evening sunshine. We cooked on a camping stove under the stars, and then sat late into the night drinking beer and wine, nibbling extraordinary quantities of cheese and listening to the eccentric musical tastes of James Peat, whom some of you may remember from A Sting in the Tale as the PhD student who made his own trousers. He had brought along his iPod, something that in 2003 seemed improbably, almost magically, advanced. Since the house was far from habitable, we slept in a cluster of tents in the field, and at times it felt as if we were forming some sort of hippie commune. Indeed, if ever I was away buying supplies, I am told that James would often take the opportunity to wander around the farm naked, but he seemed uncharacteristically self-conscious when I was around.
The wall-demolition group made quick progress, as most of the internal walls were flimsy partitions built from fibreboard by Monsieur Poupard. They served little purpose other than to divide up the internal space into a series of dark, dank holes. The only substantial internal partition was an ancient construction of sturdy vertical beams joined by oak laths plastered with straw, dung and mud, which had divided Monsieur Poupard’s bedroom from a small, earthen-floored barn beyond. The wall was built on to the bare earth, and the bottoms of the wooden posts had rotted beyond repair, so it had to be removed before it collapsed. James was one of the gang on wall demolition, and he attacked this wall with gusto and a large sledgehammer. The whole house was thoroughly damp, thanks to the leaky roof, but nonetheless James was surprised to spot movement amongst the piles of crumbled mud and broken, woodworm-ridden beams that he was creating. He called me over, and we disinterred a very sizeable newt. A little searching revealed two more wriggling amongst the wreckage, a little battered, but still more or less in one piece. We washed them off in a bucket, exposing them to be stunningly beautiful marbled newts, their velvet-black skin punctuated with bright-green irregular spots. They are relatives of the great-crested newt found in Britain, but how they came to be living in my house was unclear. I guess it says a lot about just how damp the place was.
After completing the demolition works, we began repairing the damage. I attempted to hone my primitive plumbing skills to provide a working toilet. Alistair, a mature student with previous building experience, was the only one of us who had any idea what he was doing. He could slap on the rough rendering needed to hold together the old stone walls at an impressive rate of knots when the mood took him, but he started drinking at lunchtime and was far more interested in chatting up one of the female students than he was in plasterwork – for which I could hardly blame him, given that he wasn’t being paid – but this meant that his rate of progress was erratic at best. The roofers started trying to rebuild the old roof they had removed. A guy called Dave tried to fit the new windows that I had had delivered, a frustrating task since none of the holes was quite square, and none of the metric windows of quite the right size for the holes. James mixed up concrete and laid a new floor. Ben attempted some wiring. A slightly scatty girl named Callie spent most of her time trying to catch the numerous wall lizards by luring them into beer bottles – an eccentric and wholly unsuccessful endeavour, intended to stop them becoming accidentally entombed by Alistair’s rendering. It did nothing to help progress.
Midway through our stay, the French hunting season began. We were woken at dawn by the sound of gunfire. It sounded as if war had broken out, for there was a near-constant crackle of gunfire. The French are famous for their enthusiasm for shooting and eating almost anything that moves, and this is no myth. The French countryside is full of wildlife, but any animal larger than a blackbird tends to be nervous and secretive, for it is in constant peril of being shot. French rabbits are scarcely ever seen, although their pellets and digging activity suggest that they are common at Chez Nauche. Unlike their British cousins, which brazenly graze by the side of busy roads in broad daylight, French rabbits are strictly nocturnal, for good reason. If they were not, they would soon find themselves on a dining table.
We tried to ignore the rattle of shots and carried on with our work. On that morning I was helping the roofers, the three of us perched on the ridge of the building, from where we had a fine view in all directions. The wack-wack bird, which had been calling every day previously, had sensibly fallen silent. We spied a party of hunters heading along the green lane at the northern boundary of the meadow. There were five of them, each armed with shotguns and with several dogs gambolling excitedly around their feet, ready to collect the carcasses of any animals that their owners shot. As the hunters reached the nearest point along the lane to us, perhaps 150 metres to our north, one of the dogs put up a red-legged partridge. These are lovely birds with cream-and-chestnut barring on the sides of their breast, and this one was particularly plump. It took off with a clatter of wings and a squawk, heading towards us. One of the hunters swung his gun to follow it and fired two shots in our direction. After a second’s pause, lead shot rained down upon us, its force largely spent, but nonetheless causing us to scuttle for cover behind the chimney pot. The bird must have been clipped by one of the shots, for it crashed to the ground in a puff of feathers, but then picked itself up and ran for it. One of the hunters pushed through the hedge and set off in pursuit.
I was hopping mad, both at being shot at and because the hunters were clearly intent on exterminating wildlife on my intended nature reserve. I shinned down the ladder and ran towards the hunter, shouting and waving my arms. I’m not sure what I was shouting, but in the heat of the moment I had lost all my flimsy command of French, so I’m sure it made little sense. As I got closer I realised that the hunter was a stout woman of late middle age, wearing one of those hunting, shooting and fishing waistcoats that has hundreds of pockets for ammunition, knives, and so on. She even had a bandolier of shotgun cartridges slung diagonally across her chest. What I didn’t immediately notice was that her tweed cap was covering a pair of ear-defenders, which would explain why she didn’t hear me shouting. She was still intent on her prey. Her dog had run ahead, and suddenly the partridge took to the air again, rather wobbly this time, and she swung her gun and shot it. It was at close range, and the creature was obliterated. I was shouting very loudly indeed by this point, and finally she heard me and swung her gun in my direction. For a moment I thought I was going to get the second barrel. Thankfully she was able to tell the difference between an angry Englishman and potential dinner at such close range and didn’t pull the trigger. We had an interesting and somewhat heated debate, during which I attempted to marshal enough French to explain my indignation, while she shrugged repeatedly and seemed bemused by my anger. The dog, meanwhile, had retrieved what remained of the partridge and in a gesture of goodwill she offered me the ragged, dripping, shot-laden corp
se. I declined, and we may or may not have agreed to differ as to whether it was acceptable to pepper someone with lead when sitting on the roof of their own home. She departed to resume the slaughter, and no doubt later to recount the tale of the mad Englishman who had moved into Chez Nauche. The next day I nailed up ‘Chasse Interdit’ signs along the farm boundaries.
There were many other moments of excitement on that trip. At intervals my power tools burst into flames, which was none too helpful. We were still using some of the rudimentary ancient wiring, including cloth-covered (rather than plastic) wires – something I’d never seen before – and we eventually realised that the problems only occurred with two particular sockets. I later discovered that, due to a quirk in the wiring, these sockets were delivering twice the normal voltage: highly dangerous to both power tools and humans.
By the end of a fortnight I had a house with a waterproof roof, a few windows (and rather a lot of gaping holes where windows were needed), a working toilet and electric lights. It all looked dreadful, but it was slowly approaching being habitable, in the loosest sense of the word. We had got through an awful lot of cheese and red wine, but it seemed worth it.
It wasn’t until the following spring when, accompanied by my dad, I made my next DIY trip to Chez Nauche that I realised the mistake I had made in filling in the hollow. I noticed that the rubble we had thrown in was now inundated with water, which fed in from a ditch running down the side of the drive. What had been a dry hollow in summer was clearly a pond in winter and spring. Newts have to have a pond to breed in – they go to them to mate and spawn in early spring, and then leave them again in the summer. The truth dawned uncomfortably upon me. The hollow that we had more or less completely filled with rubble was in fact a temporary pond – in winter it filled with water, but by summer it was dry. There were no other ponds in the thirteen hectares at Chez Nauche, so I had successfully destroyed the only breeding habitat for these lovely creatures. Given that my aim in taking over the farm was to create a wildlife sanctuary, this wasn’t an auspicious start.