Some beetles were not a surprise. I had noticed the perfectly round exit holes of “woodworm” beetles in the standing dead trees, dusted with wood powder, and three small species with this life habit were duly identified. There were several other kinds of wood-borers. The rest of the list made up a recap of many of the organisms we have met in this book—beetle larvae or adults fed on the lot of them. Half a dozen or more fungus-eaters were recovered, some quite conspicuous, like Mycetophagus quadripustulatus (“four-spotted fungus-eater”) with four red spots (unsurprisingly), but others were tiny, dark and anonymous. One species (Enicmus testaceus) specialises in slime moulds. There was even a snail-eater (Silpha atrata), with ridges on its black back, that injects its victim to make the mollusc’s flesh more digestible. Several diminutive shiny beetles relied on eating pollen. I expected to find specialists for feeding on beech leaves or bark among the list, and I was not disappointed. Further specialists dined on grasses or nettles, many with larvae gorging on roots. Weevils of various complexions were capable of making a meal of just about any seed or plant. Five different click beetles shared the ability to escape predators by leaping up unexpectedly with a loud report. Max and Michael added additional dung beetles and carrion-feeders. It seems that any conceivable ecological trade has an appropriate beetle or six to carry it out. As for predators, these included slim soldier beetles and brilliant scarlet cardinal beetles; while the carabid ground beetles that scuttle away suddenly when disturbed under a log are already up to ten species, and the rove beetles more than a dozen…and the full list is not yet with me.
It was a relief for me to be able to identify at least one big beetle on brambles in July, whose larvae grow slowly, munching deep inside deciduous wood. Huge, knobbled antennae told me it was a longhorn beetle, and striking yellow and black livery narrowed it down to Rutpela maculata—the harlequin longhorn. Not every beetle demands ten years of study before it can be named.
The Future of Woods
Grim’s Dyke Wood is a survivor, but its survival until now has depended on being useful. It would not have endured as “semi-natural” ancient woodland without having a continuing role within the rural economy: for game, fuel, charcoal, chair legs, brush-backs, faggots, spiles—there was always something new to stimulate another generation of tree management, and defer clearance. Under the protective umbrella of the Greys Court estate, the woods possessed a kind of historical inertia, whereby tradition might sometimes outweigh expediency. The persistence of the woods is the arboreal equivalent of the snowclone “The King is dead! Long live the King!” (Perhaps “The wood is felled! Long live the wood!”) The assumption is continuity. This is not a sentimental indulgence, more a visceral feeling that woodland will be safeguarded, that what has already been will continue onwards into the next generation of trees.
But if the market no longer wants timber, where do we go? Beech is unloved. Nobody wants to eat off beechen platters. Very few customers prefer to have their kitchen work-surfaces made of beechwood, though sentimentalists might want to continue to sit on their old beech chairs. Nobody needs to use bavins or faggots, or even beech brush-backs. Up till now, utility controlled the fate of beech forests, and the market dictated how many trees should survive, and to what age; even in 1966 beech was still in demand for furniture.7 The high priest of woodland history, Oliver Rackham, has told us that there is less management of our tree resources now than at any time in their history. As this is written the chief economic use for beech is to supply chunky logs for open fires. Have beech woods otherwise become little more than rural decoration? They provide a backdrop for pleasurable excursions, part of the landscape through which cyclists pass on their mountain bikes. A generalised frisson of wellbeing is induced through walking or cycling along one of the old tracks through Lambridge Wood; this has nothing to do with sustainable harvesting of beech trees, and everything to do with escape from the workaday world. I wonder if our wood has become a facility, like a public rose garden or a municipal car park.
Consider a comparable transformation in the status of the River Thames. It has changed from the flowing artery that sustained Henley as a trading post for centuries into a plaything for boat people. The pleasure principle was already in charge in 1889 when Jerome K. Jerome published Three Men in a Boat—which remains one of the funniest books in the English language. The skiff carrying the three heroes and the dog Montmorency on their adventures passed Henley without remarking anything industrial. Ratty and Mole in The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908) are drenched in the pleasures of the watery life: as Ratty says, “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”8 A similar pottering spirit imbues the charming, discursive journeys Robert Gibbings recounted in Sweet Thames Run Softly, published in 1940. Gibbings was fully informed about scientific research on animals and plants he encountered along the way, and described their natural history with eloquent accuracy; if something of his eclectic spirit has rubbed off on this book, I would be gratified.
Through all these books the Thames flows as a moving spirit, and fosters a beguiling notion that life on the water is leisurely and fun, but also somehow more authentic than, for example, life in the average office. Readers still love these evocations of boating happiness; they engage with them at some deep level. When vintage boats come out of storage in Henley at Regatta, their polished wooden elegance and slow pace immediately awaken nostalgia for the days of Ratty and Mr. Toad. Their owners are more likely to stress the hard work involved in keeping them in trim and afloat. The modern “gin palaces” (as my father-in-law called them) are something else: too fast, too white, too large and too opulent. They seem out of scale for the river on which they cruise. They have names like Maybellene or Georgie Girl, though I did see one called Conspicuous Consumption that I can forgive for chutzpah. No matter: these vessels still follow the course of the River Thames for pleasure, and in that regard their owners are not so different from Jerome K. Jerome and his friends.
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THE MARKET HAS DRIVEN LACK of demand for English timber. It is cheaper to import American cherry than to use the native trees—the fine specimens I felled have yet to find a buyer for the planks they yielded. Cheap “teak” furniture floods the stores, to the dreadful detriment of tropical rainforests. Native English oak maintains its value in “prestige” furniture and floors, although American oak is a competitor in the wider marketplace. An ironic twist is that for a long time British global reach helped to underwrite the Greys estate as trade and colonial ambition expanded; now, the very prevalence of such globalisation serves to make the wood unprofitable. As the fortunes of the Star Brush Company prove, even war was good for the demand for beech. It’s the untrammelled free market that compromises its worth.
Our trees may now be left to age in peace, but that will not be best for the wood as a whole. “Crop rotation” and selection of trees for felling in the sustainable way that happened over past centuries is better for biological richness. If the wood were allowed to age to a kind of senility it would benefit only wood-eating beetles. The wood needs to be managed; young trees need to replace the old; new light needs to flood in. Fortunately for our part of the Chiltern Hills landscape, much of the surviving woodland is on estates where shooting is still important. The new “lords of the manor” are wealthy enough to keep large areas for game, even if their timber is not productive. Other patches endure to the north, around Amersham (Betjeman’s “Metroland”), where woodland is a civic amenity in communities affluent enough to “buy in” management regimes. Then there is the Woodland Trust, a conservation charity that does wonderful work purchasing and managing woods across the UK for the enjoyment of all visitors, with an eye on species that need protection. Harpsden Wood—another ancient beech wood just south of Henley—is but one among more than a thousand woods run by the Trust. Despite these encouraging signs, we cannot know whether these initiatives will be enough to allow
our ancient woods to endure for another century.
Maybe the answer lies in a revival of interest in natural wood products. A magazine for people like us is called Smallwoods, and the front cover shows men more rugged than I am happily wielding chainsaws or making poles. Hurdles, walking sticks, beanpoles, wood fencing, chipping, charcoal, baskets, wood-turning and wood-carving are all in the purview of these small wood owners. My first walking stick is just the start! Or maybe it is best to reach out to children. I like the One Oak Project sponsored by the Sylva Foundation,9 which is in some ways like this book scaled down to the size of a single tree. After a 222-year-old oak tree was felled on 20 January 2010, its wood was used for everything from sculpture to sawdust, and hundreds of children watched what was happening. The oaken sawdust went to smoke something delicious at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, the nearest three-star Michelin restaurant to our wood, run by the chef Raymond Blanc. I too have considered offering him some of my sawdust in exchange for his food.
Trees have been hard-wired into our way of thinking since the days when our forebears believed in dryads. Trees afford the best way of visualising descent: in literate societies tree images are universal in linking present generations with their past, in validating claims for lineage.10 Medieval trees illustrating armorial relationships are decked with coats of arms much like an orange bush laden with fruit. It is not just that branches leading from a central trunk provide a convenient metaphor for common ancestry, but the longevity of trees is appropriate for evoking history, and for the entitlement that comes with inheritance. Notable families are depicted like oak trees in their ramifications and their endurance; I have mentioned special roles for ash, oak and yew in European culture. Early scientists first began to classify animals and plants into groups, and Linnaeus later gave the world a system for naming them. When the idea of organic evolution and modification by descent was added into biology in the 1830s—how else to portray relationships than by employing the image of a tree? Ernst Haeckel’s famous 1874 “Tree of Descent,” leading from lowly animals to humankind, is quite clearly an ancient oak bedecked with all our animal relatives—although humans are placed at the apex, much as the incumbent Lord of the Manor might top a medieval family tree. Even when modern science (a field known as cladistics) criticised this sort of over-literal portrayal of descent, the notion of trees as displaying closeness of relationships was not abandoned. Indeed, trees with many different topologies now persist into the age of molecular biology.
Haeckel’s “Tree of Descent,” 1874.
Our emotional engagement with trees is not a matter of genealogy, however; it seems to be more fundamental than that. We find trees reassuring, just as artists find them beautiful. I have spent all this book resisting the temptation to quote the mawkish poem by Joyce Kilmer, “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree,” and it creeps in here with its tail between its legs; but we know what he means. A better, and equally well-known, poem, “Leisure,” by W. H. Davies, seems to hit the mark more precisely:
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows…
This brings to mind a jogger who came whizzing through the wood in a pinkish tracksuit one day. She was wearing a set of earphones, and as she went past I could hear a faint “tish-tish” noise from whatever she was listening to. The songbirds did not stand a chance. She wore dark glasses, and I have the feeling that if she could have run with her eyes closed she might have welcomed the opportunity. I had to fight an urge to stop her gently and invite her to “Stand and stare! Stand and stare!” But then, I have been too well-brought-up to do that kind of thing.
An Apology to All Small Creatures
That aurally insulated jogger would certainly have failed to notice tiny flies or parasitic wasps. This is where I have to make my own apology. I must offer my regrets that I cannot do justice to all the smallest animals in the wood. They each have their biographies, and there is no logical reason why any one should not have a story to tell as interesting as that of the bluebell or the red kite. There are just too many species of small insects, and some of them have not yet been identified. What I am obliged to do is pick out a few species from an ever-expanding list for special attention if they help promote understanding of the ecology of the wood as a whole.
I shall start with Ophion obscuratus, identified for me by Gavin Broad at the Natural History Museum. It is a special kind of wasp. The insect order to which it belongs (Hymenoptera) is a huge group, including ants, bees, sawflies and vast numbers of tiny insects, as well as the familiar stinging wasps and hornets, all of which share a “wasp waist”—an attenuated junction of the abdomen with the thorax—as well as several other features on their wings. Ophion is an ichneumonoid wasp that we found flying in March. At a couple of centimetres long it is relatively conspicuous as these insects go; its transparent wings carry a few prominent veins, and one marginal cell is characteristically dark-coloured. It lacks the long, egg-laying ovipositor at the rear end so typical of some of its relatives. This species is the first parasitoid I have mentioned by name. Its life habit is a grisly one: it lays its eggs on the caterpillars of moths belonging to a group called noctuids, seeking them out in the dark; one egg per caterpillar. When the larva of the wasp hatches, it consumes the caterpillar from the inside, but slowly, in order to allow its host to go on growing until the wasp larva is ready to administer the coup de grâce. Then the killer pupates, having successfully turned moth protein into wasp. This parasitoid lifestyle may sound very specialised, but there are thousands of species with this natural history in Britain alone; in fact, they are the most biologically diverse hymenopterans.
Most parasitoid wasps are much tinier than Ophion—just a few millimetres long. Andrew Polaszek collected plenty of them when he swished a fine net through the herbage along our track. Some of them went off to the Hope Professor of Entomology at Oxford University, Charles Godfray—they were “his subfamilies.” He kindly identified twelve different species. I was interested when he told me, “The Dinotrema/Aspilota group are currently undoable,” because that is scientists’ code for “We need to do more research before we can recognise just how many species there are.” There could be new science to be prosecuted in the wood, and a true expert knows never to impart false certainties.
They may be hard to identify, but parasitoids are hugely important in keeping small pests—like greenfly—under control. They often prey on only one species, to which their physiology is peculiarly adapted; hence they are of unrivalled importance in the biological control of troublesome insects. Research is under way right now to find the “right” parasitoid to control a moth that is making a meal of horse-chestnut leaves, turning them a horrid brown long before they normally fall. Recent molecular investigations have proved that wasp parasitoids long ago recruited the help of a virus to fool the immune system of their prey caterpillars so that their grubs are able to grow unchallenged. Peculiar and deadly warfare is being prosecuted among the leaves and herbs.
“Bug” is a general term for anything with jointed legs belonging to the phylum Arthropoda. My own particular animals, the extinct trilobites, have been referred to as “dinobugs” (I don’t approve). True bugs are just one group of insects—the order Hemiptera, to which I owe another apology. This group, and particularly inconspicuous sap-sucking “greenflies,” will not get the attention they deserve. I shall mention one bug, the froghopper (Philaenus spumarius), which is much more conspicuous because in spring its nymph (the young growth stage) hides itself in a palace of white bubbles on nettle stems near the woodpile. “Cuckoo spit” is the common name for it, I suppose because its appearance coincides with the arrival in Britain of the eponymous migratory birds—another parasite, of course, which is sadly now becoming rare. When its protective bubbles are smeared away, a green, helpless nymph is revealed inside, vaguely struggling
.
As for the true flies (Diptera), the group includes hoverflies, scuttle flies, flesh flies, bluebottles, ensign flies, long-legged flies, mosquitoes and marsh flies, all of which could have been collected in the wood. Diptera larvae will feed on almost anything: grasses, beech, dung, rotting leaf litter or equally rotting flesh, flowers, fungi, roots…Flies include a huge range of carnivores, scavengers, herbivores, dung-feeders, parasites, bloodsuckers—and it would take a different book to do them justice. Dick Vane-Wright’s crane flies have had to stand in for them all. I visualise our woodland habitat crammed with tiny beings in pursuit of dozens of different trades. This is not like a human city, because some of the trades are unknown on our scale. There is no human equivalent of parasitoids; at least, I very much hope not.
I should be more accurate. At insect size the wood is a concatenation of habitats. A nook or a cranny is a habitat, as is the space between two crumpled bramble leaves. Charles Hussey locates a special site I could easily have passed by. Little pools of water collect where beech branches have rotted or broken off, or in holes in stumps. They look dark and unwholesome, as if they could furnish an ingredient for a witches’ brew. I should have known: they also provide a special habitat. Charles is a microscopist, and he collects little phials of somewhat murky stuff to take home to examine more closely. He reports that there are creatures I could never have imagined living in these miniature lagoons. A curious pallid, elongate little thing with six legs is a larva of an uncommon beetle, specialised for this location, called Prionocyphon serricornis. A few mosquito larvae (Anopheles) are less of a surprise, as I am used to seeing them twitching about in wet, stagnant corners at home. I really did not expect to see a crustacean, but there proved to be plenty of minute copepods (Bryocamptus minutus). I usually think of such planktonic crustaceans as marine, and they are among the most abundant creatures in the sea, but there are plenty of freshwater species, and now here is a tiny, segmented, hairy-limbed swimming animal specialised for life in tree holes.
The Wood for the Trees Page 30