This book is a delight from beginning to end. The catalyst for writing it is his home in the Charente, bought so he could provide home, in the form of an extensive meadow, to a huge variety of wildlife, specifically insects. This is no Aga saga of a Brit in France, but a mixture of reminiscence, hard scientific fact, vivid stories of his own experiments and research, and the work of others. It's a page turner and a tale well told with humour, and an eye for the telling detail. I'm no scientist, but I was absorbed from start to finish.

His concluding message is a serious one: through ignorance, through folly, the human race risks destroying natural systems and eroding biodiversity.... and thereby itself. This is the really important message. But the other is that the world of insects and other small 'bugs' is entrancing and intriguing. Notice what we have beneath our feet and at the bottom of the garden! ( )

A nice read, a mix of running diary, scientific research and field biology. Learned some interesting things about a few different insects and some things about flower “sex” I never knew. Sounds the alarm about pesticides in general and neo nicotinoids in particular and the research on that is interesting ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3623655.html

A very entertaining book about wildlife and diversity, mainly around the author's home in rural France but with flashbacks to his childhood and student and young researcher days in England. Mostly it is about insects, but there are three chapters on plants and one on reptiles and amphibians. The underlying theme of course is our need and responsibility to protect biodiversity and the environment, and the last couple of chapters are grim surveys of the risks ahead if we fail. Not my subject at all, but passionately written with lots of details that will keep coming back to me. ( )

A decade ago Goulson decided to buy a derelict farm deep in the French countryside with 33 acres of land so he could realise the dream of creating a place for his beloved bumblebees to live and thrive. But as he works on the farm and the land he comes to realise there is a lot more going on in what looks on the surface to be a simple meadow.

He writes about how everything is interconnected, from the way that the plants attract pollinators, the sheer numbers and variety of insects that fulfil a specific purpose and the way that this affect all the other animals up the food chain. In this he has anecdotes about bedbugs, wasps and butterflies.

But in this he also has a wake up call for us. The latest pesticide, neonics, has been passed as safe by all the authorities, but follow some original research that he did, and was published in Nature, he is questioning the very fact they should be available. There pervasiveness in the modern farms is affecting all insect life, from the good and the bad, and there is no real proof that they do increase yields. Scary stuff.

Written with his usual humour and wit, this is a book of the time, and its conclusions should be acted upon. ( )

A ramble through the natural history of a French meadow the author is restoring, touching on bumblebees, butterfly wingspots, mantis cannibalism, newts, parasitic wildflowers, and all manner of other topics. Rather the feel of a series of magazine articles strung together, but united by a lovely location in rural France. An eye-opening contrast with conservation and habitat restoration in New Zealand, where farmland is essentially written off as as a total wasteland with no conservation value, and all the work goes into remnant forest. We could learn a lot from farming practices in Europe (both good and bad). ( )