Case material

One of my earliest memories is of examining caddisly larvae in the mountain streams of the Welsh border where I grew up. They are hard to distinguish among the underwater debris with which they make their protective cases , binding together tiny fragments of leaf and bark or  granules of sand the size of sugar crystals. You have to look very carefully to spot these tiny tubes - one is visiible in the thumbnail but there are several more in the picture.

 When I was a small child my father and I spent many hours out in the hills and valleys around our cottage. I didn't go to school until I was 6, nor did I attend any sort of nursery or infant class - we were too isolated and had no transport. But we would tear the bark off a rotten log or turn over a big flat stone to see what was beneath: beetles, earwigs, centipedes, woodlice, ants. We inspected the paths and dung pits of badgers, kept a 'pet' slow worm for a while,  watched a fox doing its morning toilette, bagged a big salmon just caught by an otter, and collected edible fungi (as all Russians do). I quickly learnt to identify them along with plants and trees, their names remaining  forever fixed in my brain.

I was very fortunate in growing up when and where I did and with parents who liked to spend time out of doors and who valued the natural world, without being sentimental about it. Later I learned to paunch a rabbit, skin a mole and guddle trout.  

In the last 50 years Britain has lost 50% of its wildlife mass; half as many animals, birds, insects and wild flowers as before exist alongside of us. We no longer hear such a variety of birdsong nor do our car windscreens get plastered with bugs. Most children don't recognise basic natural  history words and as a result they have been cropped from junior dictionaries, replaced by terms relating to technology and social media.

So it was with great delight that I recently learnt that from 2022 school children will be able to take a GCSE course in Natural History. This was the brainchild of TV and radio producer Mary Colwell, supported by Green Party MP Caroline Lucas. You can read about it here. 

The coronavirus lockdown has also seen a resurgence of interest in garden wildlife, growing, foraging etc. Maybe the restrictive regime of the past 10 weeks will spark new enthusiasm for getting out of doors, not just to overcrowded beaches but to quiet unexciting places where you have to watch and wait to see what there is to see. Such as these almost invisible caddisfly larvae.