A Sting in the Tale (2 page)

There were many other such disasters. Perhaps the most traumatic involved my quails. These lovely little creatures scurried around on the floor of the aviary scratching for food. The male had beautiful black and white markings on his face, and a rather splendid plume on top of his head. The female was more drab but delicately marked with dark speckles. They were inseparable, behaving as if glued together side by side, and often grooming one another. I preferred them to the budgies, which I had eventually concluded were decidedly raucous, uncouth and gaudy beasts (perhaps my view was coloured by the savage pecking they gave me whenever I had to handle them). Now, Shropshire is a cold county in winter, as my bald budgie discovered. It is a long way from the warming influence of the sea, and often records the coldest night-time temperatures in England. After one particularly cold night I went out in the early morning to feed the birds in the aviary, and was surprised to see the budgies attacking the quails. Both quails were struggling on the snowy ground, each with two or three budgies perched on them and tearing mercilessly at their feathers with their jaggedly pointed beaks. I rushed in and shooed the budgies away. The poor quails seemed unable to stand, but were very much alive. I picked them up, one in each hand, and took them indoors. On the kitchen floor, it became obvious what their problem was. Whenever they tried to stand, they simply toppled over. Closer inspection revealed that they had no toes; they had both suffered from frostbite in the night, and their toes had simply dropped off. Their legs now ended in stumps, no use at all for standing up or walking. Distraught, I did not know what to do. In a flash of desperation, I tried to fashion them prosthetic feet from plasticine and matchsticks, but this was not a triumph so I laid the birds, still struggling to come to terms with their new prostheses, in a cardboard box with some food and went to school.

When I came home, the situation had not improved. The birds had not miraculously grown back their toes, or worked out how to use their new plasticine-and-matchstick feet. They were just lying there, looking a little more feeble. The harsh reality dawned: my quails were not going to get better. They could not be fixed. I had felt terribly guilty that my bald budgie had probably frozen to death, and it was clear that it would have been kinder to have given it a swift death. With this in mind, I decided that there was only one thing for it.

I cannot remember why I decided against enlisting the help of my parents to take the poor birds to the vet at this point. A quick lethal injection would have been the most sensible solution, but small boys are not logical. Instead, I got my dad's axe from the shed. It was a full-sized, grown-up's axe, way too big for me at the time. I took the birds to the bottom of the garden, and laid them next to each other on the grass. I figured that it would be best to deal with them both at once, rather than dealing with one while the other looked on. They lay there, looking up at me, their eyes still bright, their stumps kicking ineffectually. I hefted the axe on to my back and took a huge swing. The head of the axe buried itself in the lawn, just in front of the beaks of the startled but otherwise unharmed birds. I had been aiming to sever both their heads in one blow. I eventually managed to pull the axe out of the ground, and tried again. Success! More or less. I didn't so much sever the heads as chop both birds clean in half, but the end result was much the same. I dug a small hole next to my rockery and laid them to rest, roughly reassembled and side by side, as they had spent their lives.

I could go on. I could mention the awful fate of my axolotl, or my botched attempt to perform corrective surgery on a badly injured rook. Suffice it to say that being one of my pets was a dangerous business.

As well as amassing a diverse array of living creatures, I became an avid collector. I am embarrassed to admit that this started with birds' eggs. In the 1970s in rural England this was a very common hobby for boys. Many of my friends collected eggs, and we would vie with one another to obtain unusual specimens. My father showed me how to blow the eggs; he had collected them himself as a boy, along the same hedgerows that I now searched. One grinds a tiny hole at each end by spinning a pin between one's fingers while pushing the tip against the shell. The idea is to then blow on one end, forcing the contents out through the opposite pinhole. Easy enough with a chicken's egg, but incredibly fiddly with the tiny white-and-brown-speckled egg of a wren. My prize specimen came from a mute swan. When out ‘egging' along the local canal bank with my friends Les and Mark (or ‘Butt' as we knew him, for reasons long forgotten), we spotted the egg lying in an abandoned nest in a reed bed near the opposite bank. The rest of them had long since hatched and the parents and cygnets were nowhere to be seen. Without hesitation we threw our jumpers and T-shirts off, knowing that the first to get there would win the prize. Butt and Les started peeling off their jeans, but I just leapt in half-clothed and beat them to it. The egg was putrid inside; when I pushed the pin into it a stream of creamy, lumpy goo erupted from the end, squirting into my face and smelling to high heaven. Blowing out the rest of the contents was a memorable ordeal, which my long-suffering father helped me with in the end as I had turned green from the smell. The egg was eventually placed, still rather whiffy, in pride of place in the centre of my display case on my bedroom wall.

Modern readers will be horrified by all of this. Egg collectors are now only one small step above serial killers in the social hierarchy (in fact, I suppose in a sense they
are
serial killers, so fair enough). It is true that most of the eggs I collected were alive when I took them, unlike the swan's egg. I do not defend egg collecting; I certainly would not allow my three boys to do it. But I did learn an awful lot about natural history by spending my days hunting for eggs. We only ever took one from a nest, and did our best to disturb it as little as possible. This does not, of course, make it right. Collecting the eggs of extremely rare birds is clearly a heinous crime, and I am glad that I never managed to find anything particularly rare. But I sometimes think that we are poor at keeping perspective on our activities, and those of others. How many condemn egg collecting, for instance, while allowing their pet cat to roam unfettered? (Domestic cats kill millions of birds and small mammals each year.)

From eggs I moved on to collecting insects, starting with butterflies. My mother, bless her, was not keen on this – but I persuaded her that I would only take a male and female of each species, and could not do too much harm. To start my collection I bought a dead, dry but very beautiful tropical swallowtail from a butterfly farm in Dorset called Worldwide Butterflies. It arrived in a paper envelope inside a small cardboard box which I opened with great excitement. What I hadn't anticipated was that the specimen would not have been ‘set', which is to say that its wings were folded shut, and it did not have a pin through it. I tried to open the wings, not understanding that this is impossible with a dry butterfly; they are incredibly brittle and delicate. The wings snapped off along with most of the legs as I clumsily tried to arrange it in an attractive position. I was left with a very sad collection of body parts. Disheartened, I managed shortly afterwards to get hold of a second-hand book,
Studying Insects
by E. B. Ford, which explained where I had gone wrong. To pin and set a butterfly with the wings flat and beautifully symmetrical, as they are always displayed in museums, it must be freshly killed, or if it is dry it must first be ‘relaxed' by putting it in a tin with moist tissue paper for a couple of days (no longer or it goes mouldy). When soft and damp the butterfly can be carefully pinned and arranged in whatever position is desired. Once it dries, it will remain fixed in position for ever, so long as it does not get damp again.

Studying Insects
also explained how to make a killing jar by filling the bottom of a large jam jar with crushed laurel leaves; when crushed, the leaves release cyanide, which smells strongly and sweetly of marzipan (even knowing it was poisonous, I couldn't resist having a good sniff every now and again). A few minutes inside the jar is enough to send a butterfly into a permanent sleep.

I also tried constructing a butterfly net from a wire coat hanger and a pair of my mum's stockings, but this was hopeless, and without a net it was almost impossible to catch anything. Eventually, I discovered the address of a company named Watkins & Doncaster, based in Hawkhurst in Kent. They billed themselves as ‘suppliers of entomological equipment'. I wrote to them, and a few days later received their catalogue through the post.

This was a seminal moment in my life, a turning point from which I have never looked back.

I had just arrived home from a game of mini-rugby, so I guess I was eight years old. I was covered in mud, so I took the catalogue up to read in the bath. The Watkins & Doncaster catalogue was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen. Fat, it contained page after page of illustrations of the most amazing paraphernalia: insect nets, pond-dipping nets, pillboxes, cages, tubes, magnifying glasses, malaise traps, microscopes, setting boards, moth traps, pooters, beautiful mahogany insect cabinets. At the end was a section on taxidermy, which contained such entrancing objects as a brain scoop, bone cutters, and a vast selection of glass eyes. I was transfixed, amazed. This was a whole new world. Moreover, there were obviously lots of other people out there like me! I wanted to buy more or less everything in the catalogue, but my pocket money placed severe limits on what I could afford. Nonetheless, my first purchase was a full-sized, professional kite net which cost me £16, a fortune to an eight-year-old boy, and I was immensely proud of it. It was nearly as tall as me, with a stout brass handle, a rigid metal frame and a soft and very deep black net. With this, I felt I could catch almost anything.

My butterfly collection slowly grew, as did my collection of books about butterflies and other insects. My first catch was a terribly tatty painted lady, her wings torn from the long migration from Morocco. I soon added a meadow brown, large and small whites, a gatekeeper, speckled wood, small tortoiseshell, red admirals, common blue and peacock. The beauty of these creatures takes my breath away to this day; I still have the specimens, in the top drawer of an insect cabinet which I was only able to afford three decades later. I also learned to search for the eggs and caterpillars, which meant finding out what the caterpillars ate, and also how to identify the plants. With a little care it is easy to rear caterpillars into adult butterflies; that way one gets beautiful fresh specimens to add to one's collection, and the surplus can be released. I picked up an enormous amount of knowledge.

From butterflies I expanded my interests to include moths. Most moths fly at night, and to catch them there are two popular approaches. One is to go ‘sugaring'. This involves boiling up a fantastic brew of black treacle, beer, brown sugar, vanilla essence, pear drops, rum or brandy, and pretty much anything else one fancies so long as it adds to the heady aroma. Every moth collector has his own highly secret recipe, or so it seems. Whatever the mixture, the end result should be a thick gloopy liquid that smells so strong that it makes one's eyes water at fifty paces. This is then painted at dusk on to fence posts or tree trunks. The idea is that moths find the smell irresistible and are drawn to land and drink the sugary syrup; they become hopelessly intoxicated by the alcohol, and then sit there in a stupor ready to be snatched up by the eager moth collector. I stank out the house brewing up various versions of this, and got through much of my mum's sugar, treacle and food flavourings and a lot of my dad's alcohol. The end results were disappointing. Earwigs appeared to be the only creatures that were consistently attracted; I sometimes had hundreds of them swarming over my sugar patches, getting stuck in the goo as they climbed over each other in their feeding frenzy. Hardly a single moth appeared. I also found it slightly nerve-racking wandering around the local fields at night on my own (not least because my father regularly let me and my brother stay up on Saturday nights to watch Hammer House of Horror movies, and my overactive imagination conjured up a vampire in every shadow). On one occasion I was checking the sugar patch on a large ash tree when a tawny owl decided to screech just above me. Although I knew it was an owl, I had great difficulty resisting the temptation to sprint straight back home, and my heart didn't stop hammering in my chest for a good ten minutes.

There is an alternative and more convenient way to attract moths: a light trap.
Studying Insects
explained the principle: moths are attracted to candles and any other light sources. Hence this sort of moth trap involves a bright light hung above a container a bit like a lobster pot. The moths are drawn to the light, blunder into it and fall down through a funnel into a large dark container usually stuffed with egg cartons, which they seem to like to sit on. This sounded much easier and less scary than traipsing round the fields in the dark with a bucket of treacle, so I decided to give it a go.

I rigged up a 100-watt light bulb over a home-made cardboard funnel, itself sitting on a plastic bucket, turned it on before going to bed and eagerly awaited the morning. I dashed down at first light to survey my catch. Disappointment: nothing but a couple of wasps and a tiny brown ‘micro' moth as I now know they are called. I tried for a couple of weeks, but with little success. After some research, I gathered that ultraviolet light was best for attracting moths. By chance my mother had a rather odd and old-fashioned heat lamp used to treat muscular injuries, something she had possessed ever since she was in college training to be a sports teacher. It resembled an enormous Anglepoise lamp, but with two very fancy-looking bulbs, one of which produced infrared heat, and the other ultraviolet light. To this day I've no idea why anyone thought it was a good idea to give injured body parts a jolly good tan as well as a blast of heat; presumably skin cancer was not well understood at the time. Anyway, I'd never seen my mother using it (probably a good thing) and I figured she wouldn't mind if it was cannibalised in the name of scientific research. The only problem was that it wasn't possible to turn on the ultraviolet lamp without the heater element. Undeterred, I rigged up both bulbs next to one another above my home-made bucket trap, and left it on for the night. The next morning, I came down to a qualified success. The UV lamp had attracted a lot of moths, but unfortunately they had been frazzled to a crisp by the heat lamp: my trap was full of charred moth bodies. Not quite what I was after. In frustration, I attempted to rewire the lamps to separate the two bulbs. I don't 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 Mother's 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 ‘Robinson's mercury vapour moth trap' (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.