Up, Up and Away by John Brackenbury

Author:John Brackenbury [Brackenbury, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781839524813
Publisher: Brown Dog Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I am wary of that well-known saying ‘what does not kill you makes you stronger’ which sounds artificial and glib and often turns out to be catastrophically wrong. But on this occasion I think there was some truth in it. After you have devoted several years of your working life, day in, day out, to making observations on an animal – even as part of a rather dry, clinical investigation of the mechanics of an insect – you begin to see the animal in a different light from when you started. Initially it is no more than a collection of data points for a scientific study, a biological machine on which you make elaborate measurements. You eventually realise that the ‘machine’ is in fact a complex living thing, with a life outside your immediate concerns. Their relationships with the wider world may seem to be of an infinitely lower order if judged by human standards but that is not the correct way to view them. Perhaps no one understands this better than beekeepers, who come as close as is humanly possible to interpreting the mind of an insect. It is also true that most insects are just as capable of observing you as you are of them: there are two ends to a telescope. I wouldn’t want to overstate this, insects are an alien species to which a human being represents only one of two things: either a large threatening presence or else a desirable target for a meal of blood. Enthusiastic owners of pet mantises and tarantulas might take a different view but I think it applies equally to a butterfly evading capture from someone brandishing a net, or a mosquito intent on piercing your arm in the middle of the night.

This does not necessarily rule out the possibility of a more perhaps ‘nuanced’ interaction between man and invertebrate. The question may not be as strange as it sounds because almost all of us have at some time been in a situation where the notion could be said to apply. You are cooking, the kitchen is full of steam and appetising smells so you open the door to the outside. Suddenly you hear the drone of a bluebottle. You wave your hands vaguely as it tries to settle near the cooker. The fly keeps coming back, even has the nerve to land on your arm; so you seize a spatula, swipe wildly at the air and chase the hated intruder from the kitchen to the sitting room. No sooner have you returned to the cooker than the drone starts up again. For a moment the pitch of the sound rises as the bluebottle flies up and down the walls and the window panes, anywhere so it seems but the open door. ‘Stupid fly!’ you mutter, bearing down on it once more. The fly now senses the increased menace in your movements, suddenly remembers where the door is and flies straight out. ‘Not so stupid after all’, you think. It

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