THE biologists B. K. Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson said: ‘Let us not despise the lowly ants, but honour them. For a while longer at least, they will help to hold the world in balance to our liking, and they will serve as a reminder of what a wonderful place it was when we first arrived.’
If conservation means to restore a mutually rewarding relationship between the human and the non-human world, and if this begins with not despising but honouring, then invertebrates present us with a challenge. Few are loved, many are loathed or feared, and all the others —some 40,000 species in the UK and perhaps 10 million worldwide—are simply disregarded.
At 1.11 pm on 26 November 2018 the endangered narrow-headed ant Formica exsecta returned to Bovey Heathfield nature reserve after an absence of fourteen years. Stephen Carroll marked the time precisely: he had for years been one of a very few people to concern themselves with the fate of this little-known species. Until 1846 the narrow-headed ant was unregarded, warranting not even the faint distinction of a name of its own. First described scientifically by Finnish entomologist Wilhem Nylander, it was located near Bournemouth in 1865, and over the following thirty-seven years Britain’s small community of myrmecologists found it in the New Forest, the Isle of Wight, and, in 1902, the extensive heathlands around Bovey Tracey in Devon.
この記事は Country Life UK の November 11, 2020 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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この記事は Country Life UK の November 11, 2020 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
Save our family farms
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A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
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Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
