A fine creation from a doomed insect.
It’s the finest, most delicate thread in the world and can be dyed and woven into smooth yet light clothes fit for an emperor let alone a modern man of distinction or a lady of style and discernment. This cloth is the bee’s knees, the cat’s pyjamas or, to more explicit, the beautiful lament of the doomed moth. Yet for thousands of years its existence was a closely guarded secret, hidden behind a thousand mile wall in the fastnesses of Northern China. Anybody who tried to take the secret out ... Read more »
Jungle Bugs
From a distance, it looked like a rotten stick, covered in white lichen, such as you might see in Derbyshire, but no! The lichen was moving. I looked more closely. The stick was covered with hundreds of bright white insects, each one decorated with appendages resembling flower parts, tiny stamens, bifurcate... Read more »
A curious tale of butterflies, ants, wasps and the passage of thyme
The large blue butterfly is the largest and rarest of our blue butterflies. Clouds of them can be seen fluttering over heathland on a summer evening, but in the eighteenth century the passion of Victorian gentlemen for collecting butterflies nearly drove them into extinction. Conservationists tried to protect them by... Read more »
Decoys
I was running along the narrow track that threaded its way along the grassy slope. The deer were feeding far below me. The rain the previous night had made the mud slick and my feet slipped at every pace. I was concentrating on the way ahead when a faint hissing... Read more »
