A Buzz in the Meadow
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Authors: Dave Goulson
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Contents
4. Mating Wheels and Sexual Cannibalism
6. The Secret Life of the Meadow Brown
7. Paper Wasps and Drifting Bees
8. The Mating Habits of the Death-Watch Beetle
Part II: The Rich Tapestry of Life
Part III: Unravelling the Tapestry
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For Lara
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 â 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 â and are causing â 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.
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 â¦
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
â 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 â 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.