Detracting away from the next Kenya entry for a moment, I just wanted to say a few words on an ugly issue I’ve noticed over the past week. The animal concerned is mainly the Northern Adder, Vipera berus; though it could really apply to any animal that is venomous/has less or more than four limbs/is not a mammal or bird etc., delete as applicable. This whole thing was brought to my attention on Tuesday from Habitat Aid’s blog entry on the public response to a Daily Mail article. Unusually for such a hate-filled paper, the article itself was not the problem, which was about the conservation issues currently surrounding our only venomous snake.

Many of the comments however were something else, and only proved that many of us are still incredibly self-centered in our views towards nature. The comments and their context was explored in greater detail in Habitat Aid’s blog I’ve linked above, but I felt inclined to write this after seeing the reaction from previously reasonably-respected columnist Alexander Chancellor in today’s Guardian. Only a couple of paragraphs you can read here at the bottom of the article; it was still enough to show he was no better than those Daily Mail readers. Commenting on the same issue of the adder’s plight in the UK, Chancellor opens this remark with:

“I’m all for preserving wildlife, but adders? Adders are not nice. They are small and mean and poisonous.”

This is typical of an uninformed view of someone who ‘selects’ which wildlife deserves to live from his own sugar-coated perspective of the natural world. This widely persistent view proves incredibly challenging to conservationists trying to gain public support for saving species that aren’t tigers, whales and the like. Taking his argument apart piece by piece: “they are small”: So what? Let’s just let everything that stands higher than our knees be the only thing allowed to live for own enjoyment then. If it wasn’t for ‘small’ animals, there would be no big ones, simple as that: “and mean” . Nope. Sounds like his research, if any, has been taken from folklore and his own anthropomorphic characteristics he’s put on something that looks ‘mean’. Adders are incredibly timid in reality, and will slither away in a flash of scales if they hear our feet galumphing past their basking spot like an earthquake. Never do they purposely seek us out to spear their fangs into our ankles. And anyway, there’s no such thing as a ‘mean’ animal (except for us, and perhaps chimps, though that is debatable). Every animal works on basic instinct to survive, and will not risk injury or waste energy  to attack something it doesn’t need to. Continue reading →

For my first proper post, I thought I’d start on something memorable. A post on a group of animals that have wowed millions in their array of diversity, that have inspired naturalists since humanity decided wildlife was good for something other than eating, and if we lost them we too would be doomed to extinction…

Yep, I’m talking about the wonderful world of invertebrates.

Yet for all their worth, the array of arthropods, molluscs, annelids and the like that populate our planet, they slip under the radar much of the time due to the human perception of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. It’s a world we don’t really see or understand, and emotive nature finds few ways to relate to them in the same way we do to big, ‘sexy’ mammalian species such as tigers, orangutans and whales: you would never find a global, celebrity-backed conservation campaign entitled ‘Save the Partula Snail’ or ‘Fregate Island Beetle Time Now’.

Which is understandable, for those flagship species are undoubtedly awesome and their popularity is a key to finding the way to preserve them for years to come. And there are certainly some inverts that are very handy at grabbing the public’s attention due to our own definitions of a ‘beautiful’ animal. Butterflies instantly come to mind, with appreciation of their beauty thankfully turning from pinning specimens to a board for a ‘stamp collection’ to managing habitat such as chalk downland largely for the benefit of rare species of butterfly. They are probably the most photogenic of the arthropods too, as the photo to the right shows: I was lying in a Cornish field for about half an hour snapping shots of these obliging common blues (much to the bemusement of passers by) this Summer. Dragon & damselflies are another group that could be classed as ‘romantic’ insects, the sight of them buzzing along a peaceful brook in a sunny spring afternoon bringing in more deserving public respect. Continue reading →