Tag Archives: writer: dave goulson

The Garden Jungle, by Dave Goulson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

As if all this isn’t enough to ensure universal revulsion for these little creatures, there is an old superstition that earwigs favour sneaking into our ears while we sleep, presumably the origin of their name. I imagine that they might well have occasionally sought shelter in old-fashioned wigs too, though it is thought that the ‘wig’ part comes from an old word for ‘wiggle’. Lurid stories whispered in the school playground tell of unfortunate souls who were driven mad by an earwig lodged deep inside their ear, incessantly wriggling and tickling. In more elaborate versions the earwig lays eggs and rears her offspring inside, or even burrows into the brain for a snack. For all of these reasons, earwigs are almost universally loathed and even feared. Little wonder, then, that the Earwig Preservation Trust has yet to be founded.⁸
⁸ Sadly, should the EPT ever be created, it will be too late for the giant earwig of St Helena, the world’s largest earwig species which came in at a smidge over 8cm long, with a truly whopping set of pincers which made up about one-third of its body length. It lived in deep burrows among nesting seabird colonies on this remote Atlantic island, and the females were said to be devoted mothers. Unfortunately most of the seabirds have been wiped out by invasive rodents, which may also have eaten the earwigs. The last living specimen of this gigantic beast was seen in 1967, fifty years ago as I write. Rest in peace, giant earwig.

Following on from The Silent Earth, another impassioned plea by Dave Goulson for nature, and for insects in particular, this time looking specifically at gardening and agriculture, and what we can do to boost sustainability and biodiversity in our own backyards. As usual there are telling anecdotes about his own engagement, and about individual species which make their own contributions to a healthy natural environment. It’s a delight, and also a comfort for those of us who don’t do a lot of active gardening – letting it grow is actually quite a good thing to do. You can get The Garden Jungle here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2023. Next on that pile is British Summertime, by Paul Cornell.

Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse, by Dave Goulson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Of late, I have tried to turn the question around. Why should the existence of slugs or midges need to be justified, either for what they do for us, or for what they do for the ecosystem? Does there have to be ‘a point’ to slugs?

A passionate book, making the case that the population of insects in our world has declined catastrophically in recent years, and that this is a potential cause of ecological catastrophe for all of us. It’s also a loving exploration of the different varieties of insect and how they contribute to making our lives possible. Each chapter is preceded by a profile of a particularly interesting insect; and there are a lot of those.

One of his data points was particularly telling for me – I am old enough to remember that when we went on long summer drives when I was a child, the car windscreen would be liberally covered with the smashed remains of insects before the morning was out. That just doesn’t happen any more, not because the insects have got better at avoiding cars (or vice versa), but because there are far fewer of them.

So yeah, we have a problem here, and although the international community is paying attention to biodiversity as a whole, Goulson makes a strong case that insects are particularly important and also particularly endangered. Recommended. You can get Silent Earth here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2023. Next on that pile is Garden Jungle, by the same author.

Bee Quest, by Dave Goulson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

It seemed to me that the changes that have occurred to the landscape in Britain are so profound that, even in the relatively unspoiled fragments of habitat, perhaps all that remains is a pale shadow of their former natural glory. It is hard to know for sure. Without a time machine, we can never really know what it would have been like to be a naturalist rambling through the British countryside in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, other than by reading their books and notes. We might infer from the fact that there are old recipes for cowslip wine – which require as the first step the collecting of two buckets full of cowslip flowers – that they were once much more common than they are now, but we can’t know how common, or how abundant the bees were that visited them, or how numerous the worms that burrowed beneath their roots. This said, it occurred to me that there might be a way of gaining an insight into what Britain used to be like – by going to Eastern Europe. I had heard that in parts of Eastern Europe agricultural systems remained little changed, having escaped the drive for increased yield that afflicted Britain from the Second World War onwards, and which was subsequently driven throughout Western Europe by the Common Agricultural Policy’s labyrinthine and often perverse system of subsidies for farm ‘improvement’.

A heartfelt and passionate book about bumble bees, and how the destruction of the traditional landscape in the name of agricultural productivity has made us all poorer. Goulson is dedicated to the study of bees, and goes all over the world to find them (there’s a particularly vivid section in Argentina). He conveys well the frustrations of research on small, fragile and often hostile invertebrates, and the grim situation of species disappearing from the face of the planet before they have been recorded. Now that he mentions it, isn’t it weird that bats are strongly protected by the law when other animals (less cute perhaps) are not? This is an eloquent call for more thought about and care of our natural heritage, and you can get it here.

I’m glad to say that we have a wildlife-friendly garden here, and we do see bumble bees buzzing around in the summer. I’ll take a closer look this year.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2017, and the non-fiction book which had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on both of those piles, and last in my 2017 intake, is Rule of Law by Glynis Breitenbach; one more to go before that.