A Sting in the Tale Read Online Free
Author: Dave Goulson
attempted to rewire the lamps to separate the two bulbs. I donât think I had started physics at school by that age (I was about nine years old), so this was inevitably something of a long shot. When I flicked the modified light on, this time with only the UV bulb connected to the power, there was a loud bang. The UV bulb shattered. I reassembled Motherâs lamp and put it back in the cupboard, hoping that she would never notice. Of course she did. It was many years before I saved up enough money to buy a proper âRobinsonâs mercury vapour moth trapâ (an absolutely marvellous device, by the way, which lights up the entire neighbourhood with an eerie glow and attracts moths from miles away). In the meantime, my moth collection grew rather slowly.
I was not fully aware of it at the time, but my childhood coincided with a catastrophic period in the history of the British countryside, at least from the point of view of a butterfly or bumblebee. Shropshire may sound idyllic, but this is misleading. It was and is a relatively rural, green and pleasant part of Britain, but it is not the haven for wildlife that it might once have been. I moved there in 1972, and left for university in 1984. At weekends I would often walk with my friends to the Shropshire Union Canal about two miles away across the countryside, searching the hedges for birdsâ nests along the way. When I started, this walk involved crossing fifteen fields, each bounded by a hedge. By the time I left for university, the walk involved crossing one field â a huge one. The hedges in which I used to search for birdsâ eggs had been ripped out, one by one. A large part of the canal itself had been filled in, covered in topsoil, and was now just a part of the arable expanse. Where once a bumblebee would have been able to find brambles in the hedges, cowslips in the hedge banks and marsh woundwort on the sides of the canal, there was now only a sea of cereals, a monoculture stretching across the landscape. These changes occurred almost everywhere in lowland Britain, sweeping across Western Europe.
These changes drove the decline and, in some cases, the extinction of many creatures, and our countryside is a much poorer place because of it. But the battle is not lost. We have slowly, tentatively, started to find ways to undo the damage. Scientific studies are revealing how best to combine efficient farming with looking after the countryside. A range of payments is available to farmers to support them in encouraging wildlife. The British have a peculiar and unique love of the countryside and the animals and plants which inhabit it, and there is a huge groundswell of support for conservation. To tap into this, in 2006 I launched the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, a charity devoted to saving our bumblebees, and to my delight the Trust has flourished. It now has over 8,000 paid-up members, and is creating flower-rich habitat for bumblebees across Britain from Kent to Pembrokeshire to Caithness. Most of our wildlife clings on, and with our help it can recover. Sometimes even species which have been lost entirely might one day return. But that is the subject of Chapter 1 â¦
CHAPTER ONE
The Short-haired Bumblebee
In the 1870s, New Zealand farmers found that the red clover which they had imported from Britain, as a fodder crop for horses and cattle, did not set much seed. As a result, they found themselves having to continually import more seed from Europe at considerable expense, rather than collecting and sowing their own. In the end a solicitor named R. W. Fereday worked out the cause of the problem. Fereday had emigrated to New Zealand in 1869 and, aside from his legal work, was a keen entomologist with a particular interest in small moths. It was Fereday who realised, while staying on his brotherâs farm, that the problem lay in the absence of the bumblebees which normally pollinated the clover back in Britain. The problem was taken
I was not fully aware of it at the time, but my childhood coincided with a catastrophic period in the history of the British countryside, at least from the point of view of a butterfly or bumblebee. Shropshire may sound idyllic, but this is misleading. It was and is a relatively rural, green and pleasant part of Britain, but it is not the haven for wildlife that it might once have been. I moved there in 1972, and left for university in 1984. At weekends I would often walk with my friends to the Shropshire Union Canal about two miles away across the countryside, searching the hedges for birdsâ nests along the way. When I started, this walk involved crossing fifteen fields, each bounded by a hedge. By the time I left for university, the walk involved crossing one field â a huge one. The hedges in which I used to search for birdsâ eggs had been ripped out, one by one. A large part of the canal itself had been filled in, covered in topsoil, and was now just a part of the arable expanse. Where once a bumblebee would have been able to find brambles in the hedges, cowslips in the hedge banks and marsh woundwort on the sides of the canal, there was now only a sea of cereals, a monoculture stretching across the landscape. These changes occurred almost everywhere in lowland Britain, sweeping across Western Europe.
These changes drove the decline and, in some cases, the extinction of many creatures, and our countryside is a much poorer place because of it. But the battle is not lost. We have slowly, tentatively, started to find ways to undo the damage. Scientific studies are revealing how best to combine efficient farming with looking after the countryside. A range of payments is available to farmers to support them in encouraging wildlife. The British have a peculiar and unique love of the countryside and the animals and plants which inhabit it, and there is a huge groundswell of support for conservation. To tap into this, in 2006 I launched the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, a charity devoted to saving our bumblebees, and to my delight the Trust has flourished. It now has over 8,000 paid-up members, and is creating flower-rich habitat for bumblebees across Britain from Kent to Pembrokeshire to Caithness. Most of our wildlife clings on, and with our help it can recover. Sometimes even species which have been lost entirely might one day return. But that is the subject of Chapter 1 â¦
CHAPTER ONE
The Short-haired Bumblebee
In the 1870s, New Zealand farmers found that the red clover which they had imported from Britain, as a fodder crop for horses and cattle, did not set much seed. As a result, they found themselves having to continually import more seed from Europe at considerable expense, rather than collecting and sowing their own. In the end a solicitor named R. W. Fereday worked out the cause of the problem. Fereday had emigrated to New Zealand in 1869 and, aside from his legal work, was a keen entomologist with a particular interest in small moths. It was Fereday who realised, while staying on his brotherâs farm, that the problem lay in the absence of the bumblebees which normally pollinated the clover back in Britain. The problem was taken
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