Category: Other fauna

There’s plenty of public support for protecting charismatic species of wildlife like golden eagles, beavers, red squirrels, swallowtail butterflies and oak trees – even domestic alpacas, just recently. But what about the humbler creation, as the hymnist put it, of insects, beetles, and worms that actually make the world go around? Especially worms. Worms have traditionally been regarded as the lowest form of life. The word itself comes from the Latin vermes from which we get vermin, and to call someone a worm suggests they are beneath contempt. But as any farmer will tell you worms are critical to the health of the land. They devour and recycle dead vegetation, and act as tiny ploughmen to aerate, drain and fertilise the earth. The richer the soil the more earthworms there will be in it, so those worm- casts on your neatly cut lawn are more like compliments than disfigurements. It’s been estimated that in an acre of good pasture there may be a greater weight of worms under the soil than there is of live stock above it.

All the great naturalists in history have praised worms. Aristotle called them the intestines of the soil, while Charles Darwin studied them for over 40 years and observed, It may be doubted whether there are any other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world. My favourite worm quote, however, comes from the peerless Gilbert White, curate of a small village in Hampshire, whose Natural History of Selborne (1789) is said to be the fourth most published book in the English language (after the Bible, Shakespeare and John Bunyan). White is the spiritual father of all today’s nature diarists (including me) and Selborne is the record of his daily observations in his tiny parish, which he rarely ever left. Here he is extolling the worm and making a very modern point about the interconnectedness of all life:

The most insignificant insects and reptiles are of much more consequence, and have more influence in the economy of Nature, than the incurious are aware of; and are mighty in their effect... Earthworms, though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm. For, to say nothing of half the birds, and some quadrupeds, which are almost entirely supported by them, worms seem to be the great promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely without them.

In some cultures we become part of this chain too by eating worms – the Maori traditionally regarded them as a great delicacy; and in most others we willingly submit to the reverse process on death ...

I have a wonderful childhood memory of high summer – just lying in the long grass, looking up at the blue bowl of the sky and hearing the sounds of crickets and grasshoppers chirping away endlessly all around me. This came back to me the other day when I found a splendid Roesel’s bush cricket actually sitting on my back gate. The bush crickets are a special group, considerably larger than most grasshoppers, and make very loud and distinctive sounds. Whereas grasshoppers produce these by rubbing their wing-cases against their legs, bush crickets do it by rubbing their wings together. An expert can distinguish all their different ‘songs’ just as easily as different bird songs, though alas they are so high-pitched that once you’re over 50 you start losing them. I do remember the Roesel’s song, however: an extraordinary crackling like the sound of overhead electricity pylons. Naturalists have had to resort to equally bizarre similes to describe the other species in the stridulation section of this insect orchestra: the great green bush cricket ‘like the sound of crystal beads dropped in a stream down a crystal stair’; the cone-head ‘a quiet sewing-machine purr’; while the alarmingly-named wart-biter cricket produces a rapid burst of short clicks; and the oak bush cricket uses his long hindlegs to beat out a tap-dance ‘like the sound of soft rain’.

Grasshoppers have inspired some human music, too. Benjamin Britten composed Two Insect Pieces for piano and oboe, where the bounding gait of the grasshopper is contrasted with the angry buzzing of the wasp. And John Keats celebrated the cricket chorus in a lovely poem that begins, ‘The poetry of earth is never dead’, making the point that you could hear crickets through winter as well as summer. Or you could then, when the cricket on the hearth, immortalised in Charles Dickens Christmas Story, was a cheerful presence in many households. It is said that you can use the house cricket’s chirps as a thermometer. The formula for a centigrade reading is: count the number of chirps in 14 seconds, add 25, divide by three, then add four. So, if your cricket chirps 112 times a minute it should be about 20°C outside. Check it out though you may have to listen for your house cricket in a boiler room nowadays.

Crickets and grasshoppers are all members of the large family called the orthoptera (meaning ‘straight-winged’), which also includes the grasshoppers of folklore we now call locusts. Despite their destructive reputation, the Bible calls them one of the four ‘little things’ regarded as ‘exceeding wise’, along with ants, spiders and rabbits. ‘Why?’ is another story.