Not Wild about Mallorca after all, so it's MOTHS 1

Not Wild about Majorca after all!  So it's MOTHS 1.

Nightingales singing everywhere, and the air full of the sweet scent of orange blossom. This is my memory of Mallorca in May ’84. We booked again this year. It’s a mistake to try and repeat a success so this time we arranged the last ten days in March, birdwatching in the marshland in the East of the island. But coronoavirus put paid to that.

So instead of reporting on that non-event I will begin the story woven through different times of my life : MOTHS.

About ten years ago I was ill and pretty inactive for a twelvemonth. Nature abhors a vacuum we were taught in science at school so I picked up a quieter occupation which had seized my attention as a child and which I’d picked up and dropped at intervals since: MOTHS!

Towards the end f the War when we were 8 or 9 the boy next door and I were close companions, going from one craze to another according to the season  -- birds in winter, flowers as they appeared in the spring, butterflies and moths in the summer. We ranged far and wide in the quiet countryside of rural Hertfordshire. We were given complete freedom, going home hot, or wet, often laden with treasures, when hungry. ‘Conservation’ was a thing of the future and we picked and collected and painstakingly identified without the stultifying political correctness of today. I’m not excusing; we were children of our times, and lived a life of first-hand experience of the small and near.

Living as we did in war-time, with few resources, we made do with what was to hand. Our butterfly nets were made with a ring of stout wire spliced onto a hazel stick; the bag made of window net scrounged from our Mums' rag bags. Our catches (even then, we only collected one of a kind) were killed in a lidded jam jar with Mum’s washing ammonia poured into a layer of plaster of Paris in the bottom of the jar. We read that crushed Laurel leaves were good but Laurel didn’t romp through the Hertfordshire woods as it sometimes does here in Cornwall. And even then, cyanide was out of the question! 

Our setting boards were scrounged cork mats, our setting pins coarse dressmaking pins.  For display cases we begged  cardboard stocking boxes from the local haberdashery shop, and mounted our set specimens on bits of cork glued to the base of the  box. The glue was made from pieces of amber-coloured solid calves’foot jelly melted to a sticky consistency with boiling water. I found a lump of this in my Dad’s ‘useful drawer’.

Our bible was a book of my Dad's, Furneaux's 'The Outdoor World' which was a mine of information.

Our 'bible'

This book was full of helpful information, these days quite amusingly out-dated.

We labelled our specimens when we had thumbed through our book often enough to stumble on the right illustration, and when the box was full we covered it with cellophane. We stored our boxes under our beds when the season was over, and we went back to bird watching and damming streams. We were crestfallen  to find our precious moth collections were extensively damaged by spiders and mites by the time the craze was upon us the next year.

Daytime was butterflying and fishing sticklebacks and little crayfish from the local chalk stream, but the long evenings of double summertime in the school summer holidays was Moth time. We gathered great armfuls of ragwort flowers from the nearby field (where, interestingly,  the farmer’s cart horses were turned out after work and grazed, unharmed, around the growing ragwort plants.) and stuck them in buckets of water in the garden to attract the night flying moths. And we used to go up the road to the bombed houses which were flattened in about 1940, where the rubble was soon  taken over by buddleia, the flowers of course being a magnet to the twilight-feeding moths.

 

Buddleia attracts moths at night as well as day flying insects.

 And a huge privet grew in the hedge between our two houses and wild swipes across the white flowers would often catch a moth or two in our nets.

We saved our meagre pocket money and bought the three Richard South books on Butterflies and Moths in  the Warne's Wayside & Woodland series of natural history books.

 It must have been just after the war when we were allowed to go the twenty miles on the train into London, then on the tube to South Kensington, and the Natural History Museum where enquiries at the desk led us to being escorted along a maze of corridors to the back rooms of the Lepidoptera Collection. The curator showed us the multitude of cabinets with hundreds of shallow drawers smelling of camphor (they. too, had trouble with mites!) and left us to try and identify our various intractable problem specimens.  I don’t think that would happen these days. We soon got waylaid by the exotic tropical ones with eyes and tails and glittering colours and I don’t think we ever actually got to identify our own specimens!

All of this natural historying took place at intervals when w e weren’t involved in the quite  complicated hierarchy of all the other local kids’ activities. The Dads were away during the war and we kids ran wild in the weekends and school holidays. Our Mums, worn down with making do and mending,  husbands away , but having to share the house with billeted evacuee children or war workers, were probably glad to see the back of us. Different combination of kids played hare and hounds, tracking each other in the nearby woods, catching newts in the pools in the old gravel workings,  making camps in the woods, making go carts......a feral outdoor life centred on weekends and school holidays, school time largely a forgotten irrelevance!