I think it’s time I apologised to all those creatures I accidentally killed or merely annoyed during my childhood explorations of nature in the countryside of my youth, during the 1960s. I was just being an amateur scientist, honest…
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.
That’s from Shakespeare’s King Lear, although I first saw the quote at the beginning of a 1967 scif-fi short story called Flies, by the superb Robert Silverberg .
But OK, I wasn’t a boy and I wasn’t wanton and I didn’t mean to hurt them – all those creatures I collected as a child. I was just being inquisitive…
Today children in the UK are protected (perhaps overprotected?) from wandering off by themselves to explore.
And nature itself is mostly protected from theft, which is probably a good thing. Not that I accept total personal responsibility for the destruction of the British countryside over the past 50 years.
I’ll start with probably my worst offence. Like most children of the time, my friends and I fished with a jam-jar on a piece of string for minnows and sticklebacks in our local brook, about half a mile from home.
Sometimes I would bring the innocent little fish home. I remember one occasion when I put a couple of them in water in a big sweet-jar of the sort my mother used for pickling onions. I left it outside and fed them with chickweed, which was apparently the best thing to give them.
But it was a hot summer and I forgot all about the fish. I started to suspect they weren’t doing very well and didn’t go near. Finally my mother insisted I sorted it out and I found the poor things dead and white and bloated on the surface of the warm water in the jar.
The memory abides, although I don’t recall how I disposed of the evidence of my poor care for nature’s creatures. I would like to think I buried the fish with some reverence, but I doubt it.
One thing is sure though. I didn’t bring tiddlers home from the brook again.
Then there was the time we went to the seaside and I brought back a plastic bag I had filled with shells from the beach – probably mussel shells or slipper limpets – not thinking about the fact that some of their owners were still inside.
I forgot all about them. You can imagine the smell a week later when I opened the bag…
Then there was that poor frog I found in the garden. I put it in an old plastic bucket and brought it into the living room to show my mummy. But as frogs do, it leaped to a great height and disappeared somewhere. We couldn’t find it.

The common frog (Rana temporaria) - although it is becoming much less common... picture by Richard Bartz
Until about a year later when we moved the settee and found a very flat, dry shape like one of those origami frogs before you blow through its tail end to inflate it. Except it was black and mummified. Poor thing…
There were also the red ants, but at least I didn’t kill those, just annoyed them a lot, I guess. Not understanding nest organisation and the importance of queen ants, I simply took a light purple silk-fringed coolie hat I had bought at the seaside and tried to convince the ants to live under it.
I did this by picking up any red ants I saw and simply placing them under the hat, on a patch of soil. I hope they all found their way home safely…
At times I had something of a matchbox menagerie, keeping for a while ladybirds and any other insect I came across, until I got bored and released them again.
You must watch Melanie Safka singing Alexander Beetle…
I also caught butterflies in a net – but released them again, rather than pinning them to a page as many children (mostly little boys) did in those days.

The red admiral (Vanessa atalanta) was one of my favourite butterflies, a rarity when mostly we had small tortoiseshells (Aglais urticae). This is a red admiral I pictured at the National Botanic Garden of Wales...

I haven't seen a small tortoiseshell (Aglais urticae) for many years, but it used to be so common. Picture by Kallerna...
I am reminded of William Wordsworth’s To a Butterfly, which we studied at school:
My sister Emmeline and I
Together chased the butterfly!
… But she, God love her, feared to brush
The dust from off its wings.
And I didn’t collect little blue birds’ eggs from the hedges and blow their contents out after making a little hole at one end and a bigger one at the other. I remember my mother once catching my brother doing that and being very upset.

At least I didn't collect bird's eggs as my brothers did - although I will admit to picking up mermaid's purses on the beach (egg cases of sharks, skates and dogfish, bottom left of the picture)...
My mother wouldn’t hurt a fly, or even a spider. “If you want to live and thrive, let the spider run alive”, she would say.
Today I don’t see that many butterflies or frogs around. And the little brooks everywhere are drying up.
It wasn’t my fault, was it?
See more of my nostalgia blog posts here
I did a survey of conservationists and most of them had accidentally tortured, annoyed or killed wildlife as part of their childhood investigations.
Me too, I traumatised ants by ripping open their nests and throwing unripe daffodil seeds in. The poor workers, in a panic grabbed the seeds thinking they were their wards. I watched in fascination as the nest would ‘learn’ over a few weeks to ignore the seeds and pick out just their eggs and grubs.
My point is that I have a respect for ants that was born during hours laid on my belly in the grass, and that is a respect and a love that extends out from ants and covers all sorts of other things.
I hope to bring children and nature into a relationship and I know that sometimes in a relationship someone (or thing) can get hurt. That’s how we learn. You want to protect the brooks and the butterflies in a way someone who hasn’t taken that time to observe them, probably doesn’t even notice them disappearing.
Thank you so much for your words – they bring a tear to my eye and a lump to my throat as you have got it so right and put it so well…
Best wishes – I will follow your kindling blog with interest…
x
I’ve thought in the past of writing something along these lines about my own youthful wildlife crimes. And they really would be crimes today, though not then, like catching Great Crested Newts and trying to keep them in aquaria.
Still, I have an abiding love of nature and am involved in conservation and biodiversity record keeping and surveys now, so I am atoning.
The Small Tortoiseshell have declined for a few years, most likely because of a parastic fly, but my impression is that numbers are picking up again. The Red Admiral was the first butterfly I learnt the name of as a young boy, and they were frequent visitors to our garden 40+ years ago. Only recently did I realise that the ones we see are mainly migrants from the continent – how amazing that tiny insects with miniscule brains, like butterflies and moths, migrate.
Thanks so much for taking the trouble to look at my blog. I don’t have many “fans” who I actually know in real life!
I bet you kept tadpoles in a jam jar and watched them grow, too… In my day we were encouraged to do that in the classroom at primary school. Not sure if they do that any more.
I grew up in the country but in the city I am always looking for the slightest scrap of wild life – waiting at bus stops is always a good time!
I’m sure we’ll speak again…
Best wishes
Tadpoles – of course. Frog tadpoles were very successful and the froglets released back to a suitable environment. Newts much less so. The females/adults ate the eggs or youngsters. Also hatched a few gorgeous garden tiger moths from caterpillars etc.
You have just reminded me of the the way we kept a cabbage white chrysalis in a matchbox and checked every day to see if there was any movement! Then of course finally there was and we put it outside to watch the butterfly emerge and pump up its wings.
Best wishes for now – I’ve been meaning to email you about your lovely insect pictures (and the zebras)…
Have you come across Butterflies at Hidcote ?
I hadn’t, but I have now!
🙂