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WORK TITLE: Rainbow Dust
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
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NATIONALITY: British
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/author/M/P/au25019376.html * https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/cr-101755/peter-marren * http://www.newnaturalists.com/page/News+and+Features/An+interview+with+Peter+Marren *
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LC control no.: n 83019991
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n83019991
HEADING: Marren, Peter
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008 830712n| azannaab| |n aaa
010 __ |a n 83019991
035 __ |a (Uk)000999620
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100 1_ |a Marren, Peter
670 __ |a His A natural history of Aberdeen, 1982: |b t.p. (Peter Marren)
670 __ |a Battles of the Dark Ages, 2006: |b t.p. (Peter Marren) jkt. (writer and journalist specializing in British battlefields, natural history, and bibliography)
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Nature writer and author.
AWARDS:Thackray Medal, Society for the History of Natural History, for The New Naturalists; Presidents’ Award, Botanical Society of the British Isles, for Britain’s Rare Flowers; Leverhulme Research fellowship, for work on Bugs Britannica.
WRITINGS
Also author of Muir of Dinnet National Nature Reserve First Management Plan, 1979-1984, 1984. Contributor, Michael A. Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and Their Collectors, Harley Books (Colchester, England), 2000. Contributor to periodicals, including New Scientist.
SIDELIGHTS
Peter Marren is a naturalist and journalist whose works focus on British military history and the natural history of the British Isles. His works in the former genre include monographs on warfare in Britain from the ancient Roman occupation to the Norman conquest: Grampian Battlefields: The Historic Battles of North East Scotland from AD 84 to 1745, Battles of the Dark Ages: British Battlefields AD 410 to 1065, and 1066: The Battles of York, Stamford Bridge, and Hastings.
But Marren is best known for his works on natural history. He is the author of The New Naturalists, a history of the long-running (the first volume was issued in 1945, at the end of World War II) and authoritative (many volumes are written by leading scientists and have been used as introductory textbooks in their subject areas) series on the natural history of Great Britain. Marren himself went on, after the publication of The New Naturalists, to write a volume of the series himself: Nature Conservation: A Review of the Conservation of Wildlife in Britain, 1950-2001. “When I had some money in my pocket after a holiday job,” Marren explained to Tim Bernhard in an interview appearing in the New Naturalists Online, “I bought several titles, including Wild Orchids of Britain, Mushrooms and Toadstools, British Mammals, and British Amphibians and Reptiles. At university several titles were virtually set books, but we bought them as Fontana paperbacks. The ones I fell instantly in love with were Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone and Mountain Flowers which I used for planning wild flower expeditions during my gap year. They were wonderfully readable and informative, and I was convinced that the authors had written them specially for me.”
Marren’s other works in the genre include books on conservation efforts in the British isles (Britain’s Ancient Woodland: Woodland Heritage, The Wild Woods: A Regional Guide to Britain’s Ancient Woodland, Postcards from the Country: Living Memories of the British Countryside, and Where Have All the Flowers Gone? A Study of Local Extinctions as Recorded in the County Floras), books on wildlife and wildflowers (Britain’s Rare Flowers, Stipitate Hydnoid Fungi in England, Mushrooms, and Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies, which was published in the United States under the title Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Butterfly Delight), and a memoir, Where the Wild Thyme Blew: Growing up with Nature in the Fifties and Sixties. “Marren longs for the rebirth of old-style popular natural history, where all sorts of people take a knowledgeable interest in the wild birds, bugs and wildflowers around them,” said Gail Vines in the New Scientist. “Such a grassroots resurgence would do more to safeguard our countryside.”
Bugs Britannica
Marren’s Bugs Britannica is less a serious investigation of the science of entomology and more a compilation of how Britons have come to understand them over the centuries. “In Bugs Britannica,” said China Miéville in the Guardian Online, “the word ‘bug’ is misleading: all British invertebrate life is examined here, including octopus, jelly- and shellfish, and even some halfway-house specimens with spinal cords which the authors endearingly confess make them ‘nearly-vertebrates.’ The book is organised by taxonomy, starting with single-cell organisms, working through worms and crustaceans, arachnids and insects, all the way to those troublesomely interstitial chordata. This makes for a pleasing cognitive dissonance, cultural ruminations organised by a Linnaean schema one associates with scientific textbooks.” “It includes ‘traditional’ folklore,” stated Oliver Rackham in the Spectator, “a prime course being Dr Thomas Muffet, Shakespeare’s contemporary, spider-lover and possible step-father of Little Miss Muffet. It relates well-known (but true) stories like the Large Blue: a caterpillar that things it’s an ant, and the ants that think it’s an ant. It tells tales like the six million Cabbage-White butterflies said to have been caught (and eaten?) by sundew plants at Upton Broad, Norfolk.”
Critics enjoyed Bugs Britannica. “Bugs Britannica … [is] a nationwide chronicle of bug life in the 21st century, looking at why mini-beasts matter to us and why we care about them, recording our continuing love-hate relationship with small creatures and how that influences our life and times,” declared Michael McCarthy in the London Independent Online. “Britain has long been a nation of bug lovers, bug students and bug collectors: the butterfly-collecting doctor or parson is a symbol of Victorian England. The Duchess of Portland was one of a group of remarkable 18th- and 19th-century women who bred insects. Charles Darwin was a fanatical collector of beetles, while Walter Rothschild (of the banking family) collected fleas; his collection contained 12 fleas dressed in tiny costumes, including a bride and groom. Neville Chamberlain, prime minister at the outbreak of the Second World War, collected butterflies.” “I began this book fully intending to follow the authors’ advice to dip in and out of the different articles and entries. In the event, I found such dabbling incredibly difficult; each bug and its accompanying text is so fascinating that I wanted to read them all,” concluded Charlotte Sleigh in the London Telegraph Online. “Words aside, the jewel-like images on every page will catch the attention of readers of all ages.”
Rainbow Dust
Rainbow Dust is an attempt to understand the ways that we have been affected by butterflies and the threats we pose to their continued existence. “Marren deals with the subject of extinction and preservation with sympathy, and some sorrow,” declared Sophia Waugh in the London Telegraph Online. “Although he does not advocate collecting butterflies in the way that generations of schoolboys as well as scholars have done, he is adamant that it is not the collectors themselves who have put the butterflies at risk. Rather, it was the builders and the developers who destroyed the fens and other habitats who have caused, and continue to cause, the danger.” “This is not a field guide or a natural history,” stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “but rather a celebration of butterflies with a note of sadness over the decline of these creatures.” “Ultimately, Marren acknowledges, ‘it is hard to make an economic case for butterflies,’” said Rebecca Foster in the Book Bag website. “’We do not need them; nor, in the natural order of things, do they need us. But we care about them all the same, because that is the way we are.’ For many people, butterflies are a source of beauty and wonder, which can translate into a passion.”
As they were with Bugs Britannica, reviewers were generally enthusiastic about Rainbow Dust. “You should secure a copy of this book to read through the winter months,” advised a reviewer for the Mark Avery website. “If you ration yourself to a chapter a fortnight you will come out the other end, in spring, thirsting to see butterflies with renewed enthusiasm.” “Marren is a master of concise, elegant writing,” wrote Cynthia Lee Knight in Library Journal, “and this passionate, personal work is … a fascinating cultural study.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Guardian, June 12, 2010, China Miéville, review of Bugs Britannica.
Independent (London, England), June 10, 2007, Michael McCarthy, review of Bugs Britannica.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2016, review of Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Butterfly Delight.
Library Journal, October 1, 2016, Cynthia Lee Knight, review of Rainbow Dust, p. 98.
New Scientist, August 24, 2002, Gail Vines, “Beetle Mania,” p. 52.
Spectator, July 3, 2010, Oliver Rackham, “Animals without Backbones,” p. 36.
Telegraph (London, England), May 23, 2010, Charlotte Sleigh, review of Bugs Britannica; July 24, 2015, Sophia Waugh, review of Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies.
ONLINE
Book Bag, http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/ (July 18, 2017), Rebecca Foster, review of Rainbow Dust.
HarperCollins Website, https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/ (July 5, 2017), author profile.
Mark Avery, http://markavery.info/ (August 16, 2015), review of Rainbow Dust.
New Naturalists Online, http://www.newnaturalists.com/ (July 5, 2017), Tim Bernhard, “An Interview with Peter Marren.”
Penguin Books Website, https://www.penguin.co.uk/ (July 5, 2017), author profile.
University of Chicago Press Website, http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (July 5, 2017), author profile.*
Peter Marren is the author of two books in the New Naturalist series, The New Naturalists and Nature Conservation, and is the authority on the history and iconography of the series. He has written numerous other books, and writes regularly for the Independent and British Wildlife.
Peter Marren is a wildlife writer, journalist and authority on invertebrate folklore and names. His books include The New Naturalists, which won the Society for the History of Natural History's Thackray Medal, Britain's Rare Flowers, which won the Botanical Society of the British Isles' Presidents' Award. He won a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for work on Bugs Britannica.
An interview with Peter Marren
Hear from Peter Marren, author of The New Naturalists (1995) Nature Conservation (2002) and co-author Art of the New Naturalists (2009).
Interview by Tim Bernhard
What are your earliest memories of the New Naturalist books?
The first one I remember was Butterflies in the school biology library which struck me as different. When I had some money in my pocket after a holiday job I bought several titles, including Wild Orchids of Britain, Mushrooms and Toadstools, British Mammals and British Amphibians and Reptiles. At university several titles were virtually set books, but we bought them as Fontana paperbacks. The ones I fell instantly in love with were Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone and Mountain Flowers which I used for planning wild flower expeditions during my gap year. They were wonderfully readable and informative, and I was convinced that the authors had written them specially for me; thank you, Ted, Max and John.
When did you decide to collect the New Naturalists?
I don’t really regard myself as a collector – they are for use, not ostentation, as Edward Gibbon said of some oriental despot’s 101 wives. I bought them as I needed them; for example I remember buying Common Lands for a postgraduate essay I was doing. I did once own a nearly complete set (lacking only hardback Warblers) but by that stage I was filling in the gaps because I was writing about them and needed the books for quotations etc. I still use them regularly, almost daily, but when I needed money a few years back I cold-bloodedly flogged several of the more expensive ones, thinking I’d never need to write about the series again. How wrong I was.
How did you come to write The New Naturalists?
I gave a true but slightly dramatized account in my preface to The New Naturalists. Just luck really. If you call that luck. The NN board wanted to produce a 50th anniversary volume but wasn’t getting very far with it. Then Derek Ratcliffe joined the board, and, knowing of my interest in the series, he recommended me as a possible author. Even then nothing was done until I contacted Collins asking to have a look at their archive, and then someone remembered. By then I had less than a year to research and write it in time for the anniversary. Of course it helped that I had several published books under my wing already and so had some plausibility as an author.
Did you know some of the authors?
Yes, a great many. Michael Proctor was my mentor in field botany at Exeter, and I was lucky enough to spend a week at Monks Wood in its glory days when Kenneth Mellanby, Norman Moore, Max Hooper, Ron Murton and George Peterken were all there. When I fought the closure of Monks Wood a few years ago I was helped by a certain Ian Newton. My colleagues in the Nature Conservancy included Derek Ratcliffe, Morton Boyd, Adam Watson, Colin Tubbs, John Mitchell and Rosemary Parslow, with Max Nicolson as a sort of presiding demi-god. At odd times I’ve spent time in the field with Richard Fitter, Philip Corbet, Brian Davies and others; I met Ted Lousley and know Brian Spooner through mycology and a shared love of books, and remember a convivial evening with Chris Page. I co-wrote a book with Miriam Rothschild. It’s a small world, field biology and nature conservation. Unfortunately I am not old enough to have known the first generation of New Naturalist authors. I would have enjoyed interviewing E. B. Ford or Alister Hardy or Gordon Manley!
What is your favourite New Naturalist jacket?
Among Robert’s work I’ve always admired Ferns – bold and simple, with wonderfully harmonious patterns. For the Ellis jackets I find it impossible to choose one above the others. The ones they chose for an important exhibition at the Hayward Gallery were Trees, Woods and Man, The Rabbit and The Herring Gull’s World. Go figure. As I found when writing the forthcoming jacket book, it is hard to be critical and objective about such familiar things. The point about the jackets, Ellis or Gillmor, is their consistency. Where something falls short, it’s normally the fault of the printers, not the artists.
What do you think the future holds for the series?
Ten years ago I would have said it was running out of steam, but obviously not! This year promises to be an exciting one – print-on-demand, at least four new titles, our jacket book and the launch party, revitalized book club.
Will the next generation share our interest in such things?
They say New Nat Nuts are an aging population. But I think we’re clear up to number 130 or so. I’d like to see one about pond life, but more than the titles, I look forward to a renewed vitality in nature writing. The series can afford to loosen up a little and embrace good writing as well as good science.
Is there a book you would still like to write?
Yes, not quite played out yet. I have a book in mind about my own journey through nature but I’m not sure of its commercial appeal. Having enjoyed Bugs Britannica more than I’d expected to, I wouldn’t mind doing an anthology of ‘nature’, not just poems and writings but pictures, artwork, anecdotes, even jokes, anything from nature that ignites a creative spark in the observer. After that I’d be content to leave nature alone for a while if someone would be so kind as to offer me a large sum of money to write an amusing but reflective film script about Emperor Constantine or Warwick the Kingmaker or King Harold. I’d be equally happy to do nothing for at least six months apart from watching flamingoes and toucans in reasonable comfort, or hopping from one island to the next in some sort of sailing boat.
Marren, Peter. Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Butterfly
Delight
Cynthia Lee Knight
Library Journal.
141.16 (Oct. 1, 2016): p98.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Marren, Peter. Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Butterfly Delight. Univ. of Chicago. Oct. 2016.320p. illus. bibliog. index. ISBN
9780226395883. $30. NAT HIST
British nature writer and conservationist Marren (Bugs Britannica; The Wild Woods) remembers the butterfly collecting of his youth as a lifechanging
encounter with nature. Such an intense response to butterflies is not uncommon, and the author examines the emotional appeal of
butterflies to naturalists, artists, novelists, and collectors during the past 300 years. Marren also traces how the once popular hobby fell out of
fashion, explains how these insects acquired poetic names such as red admiral and green hairstreak, and addresses the challenges of conservation
efforts in Great Britain. While celebrating British butterfly collectors, the author also considers the sometimes obsessive mentality behind
collecting (as depicted in John Fowles's 1963 novel The Collector) by contrasting a simple childhood pastime with the methodical collecting by
heavyweights such as members of the famous Rothschild family of bankers, who amassed a million dead butterflies. Marren is a master of
concise, elegant writing, and this passionate, personal work is not only a fascinating cultural study of these creatures but also an example of
superb nature writing. VERDICT Highly recommended for all nature enthusiasts.--Cynthia Lee Knight, Hunterdon Cty. Historical Soc.,
Flemington, NJ
Knight, Cynthia Lee
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Knight, Cynthia Lee. "Marren, Peter. Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Butterfly Delight." Library Journal, 1 Oct. 2016, p. 98. General OneFile,
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Peter Marren: RAINBOW DUST
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Peter Marren RAINBOW DUST Univ. of Chicago (Adult Nonfiction) 30.00 11, 1 ISBN: 978-0-226-39588-3
A prizewinning British wildlife writer reveals the special place of butterflies in our imagination and cultural life.Marren (Bugs Britannica, 2010,
etc.), an “authority on invertebrate folklore and names,” begins with his own childhood obsession with butterflies, sharing the
moment when, at age 5, he saw the “rainbow dust” left on his fingers by a painted lady’s wing. As he makes clear,
those innocent days of butterfly hunting and collecting are long gone, given way to efforts to conserve these creatures in a deteriorating
environment. Marren has a firm grasp of history and biology, filling his narrative with vivid accounts of interesting events and encounters with
writers, illustrators, hobbyists, and scientists. With an easy style, the author considers butterflies in art and literature—from ancient
manuscripts to Vladimir Nabokov and John Fowles—and even advertising. Butterflies sell, with their images on products suggesting such
positive ideas as freedom, beauty, joy, and purity. This is not a field guide or a natural history but rather a celebration of butterflies with a note of
sadness over the decline of these creatures. Marren notes that the joy that butterflies brought to previous generations is now tinged with
apprehension over their future. Each chapter opens with a drawing of a butterfly; unfortunately, all are in black and white. Although this is not
meant to be a field guide, it does have reference value: an appendix provides thumbnail sketches of British butterflies from the most common to
the rarest. Unfortunately, these lists point up one of the book’s weaknesses, at least from the point of view of American readers: its focus
on British butterflies.
An erudite, engaging book that will find the broadest readership among nature lovers on the other side of the Atlantic.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Peter Marren: RAINBOW DUST." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463215908&it=r&asid=aa5b459e69d89fce4b19e67d4e611698. Accessed 11 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463215908
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Animals without Backbones
Oliver Rackham
Spectator.
313.9488 (July 3, 2010): p36.
COPYRIGHT 2010 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
BUGS BRITANNICA
by Peter Marren and Richard Mabey
Chatto & Windus, 35 [pounds sterling], pp. 500, ISBN 978070118102
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
What is a Bug? For this book, any animal that is not a Beast: the whole invertebrate realm, from the humble amoeba, through insects (more than
half the book), to octopuses and seasquirts (the distant forbears of you and me, lords and ladies of creation). Its scope, as with Flora Britannica
and Birds Britiannica , is the parts that Bugs play in the human story: what they do to humannity with stings and jaws and injected saliva, what
humanity does to them in the field and kitchen, their names (especially Gaelic), their roles in folklore, literature, art, music, films and
photography. It is a book to enjoy at random, not to read from cover to cover.
There have been many books in this field. Amateur scientitsts, from bishops to the young Darwin, to a lunatic pseudo-Countess, used to give their
lives' leisure to finding and distinguishing hundreds of obscure Bugs. When I was little I loved C.M. Yonge's The Sea Shore , twelfth in the New
Naturalist series, and Ralph Buchsbaum's Animals without Backbones . Like Marren and Mabey, these authors had a passion for the rare and
bizarre, for horsehair-worms and chaetognaths and nemerteans and other phyla that the ordinary naturalist sees once in a lifetime, if at all. They
revealed to me that this planet is inhabited by organisms that have their own agenda in life and work in ways utterly unlike the human species.
This delightful book revives that tradition. Technology has changed: universal colour printing has put magnificent photographs on nearly every
page of the book. However, I miss Buchsbaum's beautiful black-and-white drawings: a rotifer is not just an oddly coloured lump of protoplasm
but a real creature, that lives and moves and has its being in three-dimensional ways that no photograph can convey.
Like Flora and Birds , this book comes of a research project on folklore. It includes 'traditional' folklore, a prime course being Dr Thomas Muffet,
Shakespeare's contemporary, spider-lover and possible step-father of Little Miss Muffet. It relates well-known (but true) stories like the Large
Blue: a caterpillar that things it's an ant, and the ants that think it's an ant. It tells tales like the six million Cabbage-White butterflies said to have
been caught (and eaten?) by sundew plants at Upton Broad, Norfolk. It tells of a mosquito peculiar to the London Underground. It presents
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especially the comtemporary folklore of oyster-eating competitions and pub signs and daddy-lonlegses said to crawl into sleepers' mouths to
poison them as they snore. Coverage is inevitably uneven: there is not much folklore about microscopic worms, a great deal about lice and
bedbugs, some modern folklore about surgical leeches, but surprisingly little about ticks (were they once less common than now?).
I have a few regrets. Some Latin derivations are dubious. The authors feel obliged to produce an explanation every time a bug becomes
commoner or rarer: Global Warming will do when all else fails. They might have mentioned how cockles and razor-shells created Holland by
making the mighty wall of shell-sand dunes that fends off the North Sea. Anne Pratt, a century and a half ago, recommended Auricula (a kind of
Alpine primrose) as a remedy for illness caused by inadvertently eating a Sea-Hare. I eagerly looked up Sea-Hares, a large and colourful marine
slug, but could find no explanation of how people ate it inadvertently, though it is known as a quick aphrodisiac.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Bugs, like beasts and birds, have had their ups and downs. Collectors took their toll in the 19th century, when butterflies were worth money: some
went further, to invent fake butterflies which long remained on the list of British species. A famous extinction was the Large Cooper, apparently a
victim of thoughtless destruction of Whittlesey Mere in 1851; it was not exactly matched anywhere else in the world.
The greatest threat to bugs, among other creatures of this and other countries, comes from the human species' fatal obsession with mixing up all
the world's animals and plants. No warning has been taken from the Woolly Aphid that halted cider-making, or the Phylloxera that very nearly put
an end to wine (both from America). Maybe earthworms have had a (temporary?) reprieve from being eliminated by the great flatworm of New
Zealand; but bees and honey may be doomed, and ladybirds will soon be no more, thanks to the Harlequin Ladybird from Asia. International
trade has a lot to answer for.
Rackham, Oliver
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Rackham, Oliver. "Animals without Backbones." Spectator, 3 July 2010, p. 36. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA230950161&it=r&asid=5b0e8967f2666d70ac7cb32d5ee2b546. Accessed 11 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A230950161
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Beetle Mania. (Books)
Peter Marren
New Scientist.
175.2357 (Aug. 24, 2002): p52.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Reed Business Information Ltd.. For more science news and comments, see http://www.newscientist.com.
http://www.newscientist.com/
Full Text:
New Naturalist: Nature Conservation
by Peter Marren, Collins, [pounds sterling]19.99, ISBN 0007113064
OVER the past few decades, "saving" wildlife has become a cause celebre across much of Europe and North America. In Britain alone, a onceobscure
charity devoted to the "protection of birds" now has more than a million members.
Even central government has grudgingly come to add nature conservation to its political agenda in recent years. The plight of the flamingo moss
and the narrow-headed ant, for example, are now officially recognised in Britain's "Biodiversity Action Plan". Awesomely boring reports abound.
But is any of this working? In Nature Conservation, Peter Marren sets out to examine the track record of conservationists in Britain from 1950 to
2001.
His verdict is far from reassuring. More and more people say they support conservation, yet the countryside is far less wild and fascinating than it
was only a few decades ago. County by county, the British countryside is steadily losing wild animals and plants.
So who's to blame? Marren casts a critical eye at conservation officialdom, which he knows from the inside, having worked for a3 years as local
officer, writer and editor for the government's Nature Conservancy Council. Now a freelance field naturalist and writer, Marren is in a good
position to see where the mountains of plans and committees are taking us.
"To read some conservation reports," writes Marren, "you could be forgiven for mistaking species and habitats for a substance, like bubblegum,
that will roll off the conveyor line in measured quantities once you set up the right inputs." Libertarian by instinct, Marren is intrinsically
suspicious of planners, and of the current talk of grand-scale habitat creation schemes. Such "drawing-board conservation" is likely to lead to a
"McDonald's version of Britain, much the same from top to bottom, without meaning or detail".
Marren longs for the rebirth of old-style popular natural history, where all sorts of people take a knowledgeable interest in the wild birds, bugs
and wildflowers around them. Such a grassroots resurgence would do more to safeguard our countryside than any number of official reports, he
implies.
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It is always a mistake, he argues, to see wild animals and plants as pets or targets, when the wonder of them lies in their very otherness--their
indifference to us and their resistance to human management. "To break free, naturalists will have to put the conservation industry behind them
fora while," says Marren, "and rediscover that older quality embodied in the credo of the New Naturalist series, that 'inquiring spirit'."
Vines, Gail
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Marren, Peter. "Beetle Mania. (Books)." New Scientist, 24 Aug. 2002, p. 52. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA90980138&it=r&asid=28a41c4b44e6cf14ae4da912a5023a8f. Accessed 11 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A90980138
Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies by Peter Marren, review: 'truly marvellous'
Sophia Waugh is enchanted by a passionate new history of butterflies and their fervent fans
5 out of 5 stars
Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies by Peter Marren
Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies by Peter Marren Photo: PA/Owen Humphreys
By Sophia Waugh4:15PM BST 24 Jul 2015
What, really, is the point of butterflies? Ecologically, they are fairly useless. Bees are better at pollinating; no other animal would become extinct if butterflies did. And yet we all know that a world without butterflies would be a sadder, sorrier place. And so, for centuries, people have tried to analyse the reason for their existence.
When the Puritan and naturalist Thomas Moffet wrote The Theatre of Insects in 1589, he devoted a whole chapter to butterflies, but he didn’t seem aware of any names for them. He decided that the only point of their existence was “to adorn the world and delight the eyes of men: to brighten the countryside like so many golden jewels”. He saw them as a sort of memento mori – their short lives reminded us of our own brief passage on the Earth, and their colours (“more impressive than any robes”) were intended to “pull down” our sinful pride. Most importantly, the “elegance of colour and form devised by the ingenuity of nature and painted by her artist’s pencil is to acknowledge and adore the imprint of the art of God”.
Rainbow Dust is Peter Marren’s love letter to the butterfly, beginning with the first butterfly he caught (he was five and it was a painted lady) and taking us on a trip through centuries of lepidoptery. Literary works of natural history are modish at the moment (such as Philip Walling’s Counting Sheep or Richard Girling’s The Hunt for the Golden Mole), but Marren’s is much more than a nod to a passing fashion. Never again will this reader, at least, take a butterfly for granted.
• The Butterfly Isles by Patrick Barkham
The metaphorical uses of the butterfly are endless: the change from creeping caterpillar to chrysalis to the glories of the free-flying butterfly can be seen to represent our souls – indeed the Greek word for butterfly and soul is the same: psyche. The butterfly was painted on the walls of Stone Age caves, worshipped by Minoans and found on Egyptian tombs. An ancient Greek jar has images of a naked, erect man; from his phallus fall drops of semen that turn into butterflies. The butterfly figures in Renaissance paintings of the Virgin Mary; it is used in advertising (and in Damien Hirst’s work) to represent freedom. The butterfly, for so many reasons, calls to us.
Marren discusses the rise of an interest in butterflies during the age of Enlightenment, arguing that butterflies represented the meeting point between art and science. He unearths some great characters in the lepidopteran world, in particular one Lady Glanville, a true eccentric Englishwoman, after whom the Glanville fritillary butterfly is named. (Her cousin, Adam Buddle, a butterfly-collecting vicar, gave his name to the buddleia, or “butterfly bush”.) Lady Glanville rode and walked around the countryside searching for butterflies while one of her sons dissipated a fortune in London. When she died, leaving nothing to him, he contested her will on the grounds that she must have been mad, since “none but those who were deprived of their Senses would go in Pursuit of Butterflies”.
Lady Glanville died in 1709, just as interest in butterflies soared. It was at this time that butterflies began to be labelled. They may have Latin tags, but it is by their vulgar names that they are known, and Marren points out the glorious romanticism of some of these – the painted lady, the clouded yellow, the chequered skipper, the red admiral, the large copper, the swallowtail.
• The Hoaning Instinct: the unbelievable story of migration
Marren deals with the subject of extinction and preservation with sympathy, and some sorrow. Although he does not advocate collecting butterflies in the way that generations of schoolboys as well as scholars have done, he is adamant that it is not the collectors themselves who have put the butterflies at risk. Rather, it was the builders and the developers who destroyed the fens and other habitats who have caused, and continue to cause, the danger.
The Industrial Revolution played its part: scythes were kind to butterfly breeding grounds; machines are more brutal. The evil spider, too, has contributed to the extinction of at least one breed of butterfly. Other breeds, such as the large blue, have had their death knell played out by the weather – long, wet summers do terrible harm to butterfly breeding.
Reading another person’s billet-doux can excite a feeling of queasiness, but Marren’s passion is infectious. Beautifully written and thoroughly researched, Rainbow Dust is a truly marvellous book.
Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies by Peter Marren
Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies by Peter Marren
Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies by Peter Marren
Category: Animals and Wildlife
Rating: 4/5
Reviewer: Rebecca Foster
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster
Summary: An enthusiastic, wide-ranging book about Britain’s butterflies, from the earliest collectors and entomological societies to today’s nature reserves and academic research.
Buy? Maybe Borrow? Yes
Pages: 320 Date: July 2016
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9781784703189
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Peter Marren is a wildlife writer based in Wiltshire. His fascination with butterflies began when he was a child: he still remembers catching a Painted Lady in his hands at the age of five and it transferring some of its colours onto his palm. Rainbow dust, he dubbed it. 'It was a Nabokov moment because only he could put into words what most of us can only feel: the frankly sensual moment in a child's life when the full force of nature is felt for the first time.'
Collecting butterflies has fallen into disrepute nowadays, but in the 1950s, when Marren was growing up, it was still acceptable. It was a hobby with a grand tradition dating from the late seventeenth century. The first English entomological body, founded around the 1730s, called itself the Society of Aurelians. Some of the earliest known butterfly collections are now in the British Library, the British Museum, and the Oxford University Museum. Women also became involved in amateur entomological research early on. Case in point: Elinor Glanville (1654–1709), after whom the Lady Glanville's Fritillary was named.
From the history of collecting, Marren broadens outwards to consider butterflies themselves: the possible origins of the word 'butterfly' and of individual species names; ancient evidence of butterflies in cave paintings and later in medieval and Renaissance art; butterflies' metaphorical associations and frequent use in advertising; some famous butterfly illustrators; and so on. Each chapter is named after a particular species or two and headed and closed by black-and-white images taken from Papilionum Britanniae Icones by James Petiver (1717) or An Illustrated Natural History of British Butterflies by Edward Newman (1871).
I was especially interested in the sections in which Marren explores butterflies' cultural representations, whether in art or in literature. Chapter 4, 'Gatekeepers', focuses on the work of John Fowles and Vladimir Nabokov. Fowles's The Collector is a creepy novel about a butterfly collector whose obsession leads him to kidnap an art student and keep her under lock and key. Nabokov's love of butterflies is well known; he even curated the Lepidoptera at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He discusses his collecting in his autobiography, while metaphors of desire and capture pervade his fiction, as in Lolita.
Marren brings his discussion up to the present day by profiling extinct species and reintroduction projects. For instance, although the Large Blue was declared extinct in Britain in 1980, a Scandinavian colony was released in Southwest England and seems to be doing well. In 2013 Marren made a pilgrimage to Somerset and managed to see a couple of the elusive creatures. This is 'rewilding' on the small scale, an attempt to make amends for our destruction of habitats. With one-third of European species currently in decline, there is plenty of work to do. Nature reserves and academic research are part of the solution, but both are generally underfunded and rely on volunteers and citizen scientists to provide data.
Ultimately, Marren acknowledges, 'it is hard to make an economic case for butterflies. We do not need them; nor, in the natural order of things, do they need us. But we care about them all the same, because that is the way we are.' For many people, butterflies are a source of beauty and wonder, which can translate into a passion for preserving the natural world. I think people who already have a particular love of butterflies will enjoy this book most, but it should inspire any reader to pay more attention to them. The appendix of British butterflies, listed in order from commonest to rarest, should prove a helpful tool for beginners.
Further reading suggestion: A Buzz in the Meadow by Dave Goulson is a highly recommended and entertaining read, mostly about insects. For our younger readers, 100 Facts Butterflies & Moths by Steve Parker is a perfect introduction.
Sunday book review – Rainbow Dust by Peter Marren
MARK ♦ AUGUST 16, 2015 ♦ LEAVE YOUR COMMENT
51PF0+gMlXL._SX311_BO1,204,203,200_This is, for me, the very best natural history book I have read this year. Now perhaps I ought to mention that I am dining with its author later in the week but we’ll each be paying our own way so I haven’t been bought. It is a delight – and that is in a year of delightful books with Nick Davies’s Cuckoo running this a close second and two other books with quite an involvement of butterflies and moths (The Moth Snowstorm and In Pursuit of Butterflies) coming along in close order.
Peter Marren writes so well, and he knows so much, and he is generous with his knowledge – in person as well as in the pages of this book. When writing of Nabokov’s Lolita, Marren produces a fine analysis of the partly hidden butterfly references in the book and this wonderful sentence ‘These subtle references, lurking in the verbal undergrowth, act as a kind of authorial watermark’.
The book is about the place of butterflies in our culture and it is packed with information about butterflies, about those who collected and/or studied them over the last two centuries especially, but also the role of butterflies in our more distant culture. What might a Red Admiral signify in a medieval painting? And what might its pattern signify to an attacking bird? The answers to both questions are fascinating – and unexpected.
The lovely jacket is by Carry Akroyd – a slightly different style from her usual, but no less perfectly beautiful for that.
I could tell you more about things that are in the book but all I really need to say is that you will probably enjoy it immensely. To find out, open the book to the first page of any chapter and start reading. I wager that you will want to turn the page, every time. Marren writes with easy erudition – it’s not pretentious, it’s not forced and it’s not over-elaborate. It’s just lovely.
There is still time to see some Adonis Blues, Silver-spotted Skippers and Brown Hairstreaks in the weeks ahead, and much more, but you should secure a copy of this book to read through the winter months. If you ration yourself to a chapter a fortnight you will come out the other end, in spring, thirsting to see butterflies with renewed enthusiasm thanks to the tales that will be occupying your head. Or just read it from cover to cover in a very few sittings as I did.
This will be a strong contender for all the relevant ‘book of the year’ lists. It’s a true delight.
Bugs Britannica by Peter Marren, edited by Richard Mabey
China Miéville samples a cultural guide to all things creepy-crawly
China Miéville
Friday 11 June 2010 19.15 EDT
First published on Friday 11 June 2010 19.15 EDT
In 2007, anti-war protesters in the US reported unnatural, ungainly dragonflies hovering over demonstrations with seeming fascination. The government would neither confirm nor deny that it had developed insectile spycams, as the watchers suspected. This was not so outlandish – the CIA long ago experimented with an Insectothopter. But whether or not the little observers were spooks as well as bugs, the shiver they produced is testimony to the unease the bug still provokes: it arose not just because people were watched, but in a large part because they were watched by an insect.
But insects inspire more than just unease. Bugs have had many meanings in European folklore. Certainly they are creepy, because crawly; but where foxes tend to be mostly cunning, cats sly and dogs loyal, bugs are more varied. They might be worms as portents of death, admirable and industrious ants and their feckless grasshopper foils, or butterflies like "stray but familiar thoughts" (Miriam Rothschild). Even the maggot semiotically moonlights, being an invoker not only of disgust but of an unshakeable drive, including to the stunning heights of poetry (hence the opening of a 1685 collection: "The Maggot Bites, I must begin").
In Bugs Britannica, a companion to the impressive cultural guides Flora Britannica and Birds Britannica, the word "bug" is misleading : all British invertebrate life is examined here, including octopus, jelly- and shellfish, and even some halfway-house specimens with spinal cords which the authors endearingly confess make them "nearly-vertebrates". The book is organised by taxonomy, starting with single-cell organisms, working through worms and crustaceans, arachnids and insects, all the way to those troublesomely interstitial chordata. This makes for a pleasing cognitive dissonance, cultural ruminations organised by a Linnaean schema one associates with scientific textbooks.
The book doesn't restrict itself to folklore about each of its entries. Indeed, one of its most engaging aspects is that it's impossible to state precisely what the approach is. "This is not a book of entomology," its authors say, "or an identification guide." It "is concerned with the cultural story of the British and their wildlife". Fairy-tales jostle with literary reference and snips of poems, with representations in stained-glass and modern art, playground chants, slanderous entomophobic rumours. There's a good deal of straightforward information: what flatworms and moths and aphids look like, their habits and histories, and many pages of photographs and illustrations. Where a creature has inspired no particularly important fancies, it may nonetheless merit a short entry on the mythic resonance of its name and/or an enthusiastic description. This, added to the various crowd-sourced anecdotes that pepper the text and the gusto of the prose – centipedes, for example, are distinguished by their "extravagant legginess" – makes for irresistible dipping and rambling. It is easy to lose hours in this book.
And then there are the names: where its cultural presence permits, each animal or animalcule is followed by a list of folk nomenclature. Lists are so effortlessly captivating that one almost resents their casual magic, by which any collection of three or more nouns becomes a poem. But no cynicism or suspicion can withstand the paragraph of monikers of the woodlouse: the bibble-bug, the carpenter, the chuggy-pig, the pissibed . . .
That in many places one misses a favoured reference or discussion is, for a necessarily occasional book like this, not so much a criticism as part of the kind of inevitable and pleasurable bickering that is the very point. Does the section on the snail (for example) really have no mention of Patricia Highsmith's pet specimens in her handbag, or her magnificent malacological horror story "The Quest for Blank Claveringi"? But this is a quibble about predilection, not quality: it's a conversation.
Not so cheerful are two other kinds of criticism, which undermine the book's achievements and pleasures. One is the number of en passant errors and omissions. Some, admittedly, may bother mainly geeks (there is no "bad alien" in Terminator 2 to compare to the amoeba – the T-1000 is an Earth-made machine). Others, however, are more generally frustrating. In discussing the crab in Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, the authors mention the work of "his illustrator": that this was Kipling himself is surely very much to the point. Wetness-dwelling amoeba do not, even with poetic licence for the choice of verb, "breathe air". "Yet it moves" – eppur si muove – were not Galileo's "dying words": he lived nine years after he (reputedly) uttered them sotto voce during his 1633 recantation. The fabulous colossal octopus picture reproduced is not by Georges de Buffon, but by arguably the most famous cephalopod artist of all time (whose name is even visible on the illustration), Pierre Denys de Monfort, from a later addendum volume to De Buffon's Natural History. Such little glitches easily creep in to any draft, but that they have not fallen to a red pen undermines the authority that such an idiosyncratic book relies on.
Another problem is more nebulous. To justify their existence, large, lush, illustrated hardbacks like this have to be objects of desire. (This necessity will only get more pronounced as the ebook revolution continues.) In the case of Bugs Britannica, there is something not quite adequately swish about the production. The design is pedestrian. The paper-stock is not wonderful: the pile of heavy pages feel slightly buckled. The pictures seem not quite as sharp, nor detailed, nor vivid as one would want.
These intuitions are highlighted by comparing the book to similar visual dipping volumes such as Claire Nouvian's The Deep, or Cassell Illustrated's Inside the Body. Those are objects of great physical beauty: Bugs Britannica, while by no means an ugly or even unattractive book, is not a gorgeous one. And as it still comes in at 35 quid, it's not even that much of an economy. The work is likeable and very engaging, but with these flaws – that are frustrating in seeming avoidable – it may not be indispensable.
China Miéville's Kraken is published by Macmillan.
Bugs Britannica by Peter Marren and Richard Mabey: review
Bugs Britannica by Peter Marren and Richard Mabey, a folksy compendium of creepy crawly lore that brings man and bug together , delights Charlotte Sleigh
By Charlotte Sleigh
5:55AM BST 23 May 2010
According to a Scandinavian proverb, a loved child has many names. If that is the case then we Brits surely do love our bugs, so many weird and wonderful epithets do we lavish upon them. It would be a pleasure to read Peter Marren and Richard Mabey’s Bugs Britannica for the names alone – often region-specific – of British insects: Zowey-pigs, Whame-flies, Lad o’the knives, Meg-monny-legs and many, many more.
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Some you have to feel a bit sorry for; the Boring sponge doesn’t get a great entrée into the world from its name and as for the Penis worm – well, pink it may be, but at only 3in long it doesn’t have much to shout about.
The emphasis upon the familiar names of bugs complements the organising principle of this gorgeously produced and illustrated book. Its focus is upon creepers and crawlers as we encounter them and it includes all sorts of simple invertebrates that are not insects at all. The authors are in good company here, for historically speaking we have not been linguistically fussy about making such distinctions.
As Marren and Mabey put it, they are interested 'in the places where bug lives and human experiences meet’. To this end, the book was partly composed by inviting people from around the country to submit observations and anecdotes and their contributions are dotted throughout the text.
In its unobtrusive way, Bugs Britannica solves a besetting problem of natural-history literature and film: how to bridge the gap between the human and natural worlds. Arguably, no such distinction should exist, for we are animals, too. Yet critics of the genre often characterise it as 'eco-porn’, meaning that nature is fetishised and presented for our consumption, in however well meaning a way. Separated thus from 'nature’, we start on the back foot when it comes to figuring out how to preserve biodiversity.
There is no such danger in this book, for each bug is presented as deeply interwoven in the human experiences of these isles. There are tales of discovery (such as the five year-old who recently found a new species of ladybird in Britain), of consumption (tapeworm pills, anyone?) and medicine (a whole host of spider-derived cures from the physician father of the real-life Little Miss Muffet).
These insects and other invertebrates surround us; a perfectly average suburban garden, for example, was found to contain 8,000 species. We cannot live without them. Earthworms, it is calculated, are worth £16 billion annually to the British economy, through maintenance of soil fit for agriculture. While we’re on earthworms, it is apparently a myth that they can regenerate when chopped in half. The rule of thumb with worm species seems to be that the more gruesome they are, and the less you would like them to regenerate, the more able they are to do so.
Some of our relationships with bugs are very recent. The Harlequin beetle, which outcompetes our beloved 53 native ladybird species and sometimes preys on them directly, has rocketed to number two in polls of most-hated invertebrates in only five years of residence.
I was more intrigued, however, to learn that a genetically separate variety of mosquito has been developing in the London Underground, differentiated from its naturally-lit cousin by behaviour and feeding. An overground mozzie was probably hosted by a bird before it bit you; in the Tube, I’m afraid, it was probably a rat. The two populations no longer interbreed; they are on their way to becoming two distinct species. Indeed, evidence is even emerging of genetic drift between populations that inhabit different lines.
I began this book fully intending to follow the authors’ advice to dip in and out of the different articles and entries. In the event, I found such dabbling incredibly difficult; each bug and its accompanying text is so fascinating that I wanted to read them all. Words aside, the jewel-like images on every page will catch the attention of readers of all ages. This is a treasure chest of nature and culture, more than meriting its cover price. And worth it just to learn that the Clegg is the original Norse word for the horsefly or blood-drinker.
Buy 'Bugs Britannica' by Peter Marren and Richard Mabey (CHATTO & WINDUS, £35, 512pp) from Telegraph Books
Bugs Britannica: Let's talk about insects
First it was birds, then plants. Now our many creepy-crawlies are to get the best-selling Britannica treatment. Michael McCarthy reports
Sunday 10 June 2007 23:00 BST
Click to follow
The Independent Online
Why is there a moth called the satin lutestring? And a butterfly called the red admiral? Why are ladybirds called ladybirds? Is it true there are more midges in a hectare of Scottish heather than the entire human population of Britain? And that jellyfish from the Amazon are flourishing in British lakes? Or that Julius Caesar was led to invade Britain because of its mussels?
All these questions touch on the same thing: our relationships with the mini-beasts of the world, the ones without backbones, the invertebrates, or in short, the bugs (insects, spiders, molluscs, crustaceans, jellyfish, sponges, worms and other small creatures). Yet the answers are not generally to be found in biological text books or field guides, mainly because they concern bug lore rather than bug science.
All that will change with the publication of an encyclopedia-sized book in two years that will provide the first full modern account of the place of invertebrates in our lives. Bugs Britannica will be a nationwide chronicle of bug life in the 21st century, looking at why mini-beasts matter to us and why we care about them, recording our continuing love-hate relationship with small creatures and how that influences our life and times.
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It will be the third in a series of books about the relationships between the human and the plant and animal world conceived by Britain's premier nature writer, Richard Mabey. His Flora Britannica, published in 1996, was a revolutionary take on botany, recording the cultural, rather than the scientific, significance of Britain's wild flowers; it was also a massive best-seller, shifting more than 100,000 copies. Then two years ago, Birds Britannica, written by Mark Cocker on Richard Mabey's model, extensively documented our relationship with every wild feathered creature from the raven to the robin, and was a similar sell-out. Now another leading nature writer, Peter Marren, will use the Mabey model to chart the links between people and invertebrates in the same distinctive way, and produce Bugs Britannica as the third volume in the series (all published by Chatto & Windus). With Mabey's co-operation, Marren will be using the imaginative technique employed for the first two volumes: asking the public to help. He is seeking details of people's encounters with British bug life, anecdotes, experiences, legends, local knowledge (with all contributions credited).
This approach paid rich dividends, with Flora and Birds unlocking a treasure trove of unusual bird and wildflower folklore from every corner of the British Isles. The two literary bug-chasers hope to repeat the feat with invertebrates under a series of themes, finding out what the British call their mini-beasts locally, what uses and entertainments we have made of them, how we attract them, how we ward them off, how we keep them as pets, how we band together in clubs to study them, how we eat them (occasionally), how we like them and how we dislike them. They have set up a web address and are keen to hear from anyone with a bug story to tell.
"We want to know about your encounters with bug life," Marren said. "Do you garden with bugs in mind, perhaps with bee-friendly flowers or a pond? Are there local names or customs involving particular insects or other invertebrates? Have you been inspired by bug activity, a spider spinning its web, or a grasshopper chirping in the long grass, or the homely shape and colours of a bumblebee?
"We go back a long way, bugs and us. British bugs are probably the best-studied insects in the world. And although our relationship with some is never far short of war (modern insecticides spell total war), with most it is surely rooted in affection, a sense of awe and wander at their beauty, their charm, their oddness and ingenuity, and their sheer numbers. A world without butterflies, bees, dragonflies and shells would be a duller place. They enrich our lives in many ways, as food and medicine, as pets and hobbies, as subjects of stories and rhymes and folklore."
Bug bites
Of the bugs that like to make a meal of us, horseflies are among the most painful, and you can tell which horsefly it is from the way it bites. Tabanus attacks bare legs, sneaky Chrysops prefers the back of your neck, and Hybomitra homes in on your crutch. Midges in Scotland are much smaller, but in the right conditions in summer they can bite in such numbers as to be unbearable (they home in on human breath), and all you can do is retreat. It is said that a single hectare of land in the Western Isles can contain more midges than the human population of Britain.
There was an old Highland defence against midges, to hang a branch of bog myrtle outside your tent. Have you tried that and does it work? Do you have any patent remedies of your own for bug attack? Let Bugs Britannica know.
Bugs as food
Fancy a toasted leaf-cutter ant anyone? If bugs sometimes bite us, we sometimes bite back. We may have eaten shellfish such as prawns or mussels, but how many of us have tried a grasshopper or a garden snail? Are there recipes for home-grown bugs? Spiders and flying ants are said to be pleasant; the latter apparently taste of peanut butter, but make sure you remove the wings first. A certain Dr Buckland, who lived near London Zoo and sampled every form of animal life he could lay his hands on said the worst thing he had eaten was a bluebottle fly. Not recommended. Any anecdotes of your own?
Bug lovers
Britain has long been a nation of bug lovers, bug students and bug collectors: the butterfly-collecting doctor or parson is a symbol of Victorian England. The Duchess of Portland was one of a group of remarkable 18th- and 19th-century women who bred insects. Charles Darwin was a fanatical collector of beetles, while Walter Rothschild (of the banking family) collected fleas; his collection contained 12 fleas dressed in tiny costumes, including a bride and groom. Neville Chamberlain, prime minister at the outbreak of the Second World War, collected butterflies, as did Air Marshall Sir Robert Saundby, number two to Sir Arthur (Bomber) Harris in Bomber Command. Now people tend to look and take pictures, not collect.
New bugs
The number of new species establishing themselves in Britain, largely moving across the Channel from continental Europe because of climate change, is unprecedented: they include the fearsome-looking but harmless violet carpenter bee and the camel-cricket. Other species are increasing their range, such as the hornet, quite rare only 20 years ago and the bee-wolf, rare only 10 years ago, which are both now very common over much of England. Among the most exotic species to have arrived is a small jellyfish from the Amazon flourishing in Lakes: it is thought to have come in with imported Amazonian water lillies.
Bug names
Some familiar bug names are so old that we take them for granted without wondering what they mean, such as ladybird. This is based on old representations of the Virgin Mary wearing a red cloak, so it is really Our Lady Bird. As for the black spots (seven in the commonest ladybird), they stand for the seven sorrows and the seven joys of Mary. (Incidentally, the collective name is supposedly a loveliness of ladybirds.)
All our larger moths have English names, some of them fantastical. They tend to have been named by 18th-century artists and textile designers after textures such as brocades, satins, wainscots and lutestrings (based on lustrine, an old word for silk). Butterflies are more likely to be named after colours, such as the red admiral. The theory that it was originally called the red admirable is a myth; it was named because its splendid hues (scarlet, black and white) resembled a naval ensign. There are many local names for bugs, all gratefully received by Bugs Britannica.
Bug clubs
The first British bug society was formed in about 1730 and was known as The Aurelians. Many were poets, artists or designers, inspired by the beauty and miraculous "transformations' of the insect world (from larvae into adult insects). Britain now has dozens of bug-based societies, from the Amateur Entomological Society, Butterfly Conservation (now Europe's biggest invertebrate charity) and Buglife, dedicated to the study and conservation of all invertebrates, to special interest groups such as the Tarantula Society, whose members (it claims) wear leather and go around on motorbikes, and the Balfour-Brown Society, dedicated to the study of water bugs.
Bug-lit
English poetry and prose is full of insects and other bugs. Butterflies and moths feature in the works of Virginia Woolf and Siegfried Sassoon, and in The Collector by John Fowles. Flies have a darker role, as in the horror story and film, The Fly. Literature about bugs tends to be scientific, but A Moth Hunter's Gossip by P B M Allen manages to be both scientific and very funny. Suetonius, the Roman historian, says that Julius Caesar made his first visit to Britain in 55BC because the freshwater mussels in the rivers supported a very valuable pearl fishery. Do you know of novels, poems or children's stories featuring British bugs? Pass on your knowledge to Bugs Britannica.