Books & Bugs
How do you get a five year old interested in collecting insects? Easy, you give them a copy of this book sometime in the 1980s. My copy came from a sale at a school library.
There isn’t really much in it about insects, just these two pages, but it was enough to start to get me hooked. I remember reading though the book many times over the summer and trying some of the experiments described inside.
The illustrations were by Bernard West.
The cackhanded scrawl of my eight year old self.
I dug out an old school book, from way back when I was 8-ish. Here’s a look at the random stuff I wrote about back then.
I was an electronics geek even back then…
And a consummate storyteller.
I hadn’t quite grasped the finer points of evolution though.
And while I now love spiders, I still can’t quite bring myself to look at a centipede without a shudder.
Tea on a mountain top
Tea! The most important drink of the day. Even on top of the highest mountain in England.
Something’s crawling in my hair.
It’s a flying ant day here in London. The parks and pavements have been covered in large, brownish, winged & wingless females looking for somewhere to start a new colony.
Winged garden ant female after nuptial flight.
Wingless female garden ant, after nuptial flight. Stubs of wings visible on second body segment.
Some of the smaller males are also around, looking for a place to die. Their job of fertilizing the females is now over.
Male black garden ant dying on the ground after his nuptial flight.
Of course, all this flying protein is far too good a resource to waste,
You can wait for it to come to you…
Or you can take a pro-active attitude to catching your dinner