The Rev. Gilbert White (see previous blog), being a keen gardener and observer of farming practices as he walked around his parish as well as being an ornithologist, wrote that harvest bugs (s.p.b.) gathered on kidney beans and legumes and that they could swarm in such numbers on the chalk South Downs as to discolour the landscape. Doubtless this does not happen today.
Perhaps unthinkingly but progressively, White, in the same letter as writing of the harvest-bug, proposes ‘A full history of noxious insects hurtful in the field, garden and house, suggesting all the known and likely means of destroying them, would be allowed by the public to be a most useful and important work’, and goes on to write ‘A knowledge of the properties, economy, propagation, and in short of the life and conversation of these animals, is a necessary step to leads us to some method of preventing their depredations’. Would he applaud the multi-billion pound insecticide industry of our time? Was his letter of the 30th March 1771 the beginning of the end for insect-eating birds?
The Rev. Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne has been often re-printed since it was first published in 1789. It is a collection of very thoughtful letters mostly written to two devotees of ‘natural history’, the Honourable Daines Barrington and an eminent zoologist Thomas Pennant. It is often clear from White’s wording that he is addressing issues raised in letters sent to him. My copy is The Illustrated Natural History of Selborne as reprinted in 2007, here hand-drawn and coloured plates have been added where appropriate these taken from a selection of botanical and ‘natural history’ reference books of the late 18th and early 19th centuries sourced from the British Library Reference Division. The above picture is just one example.
(to be continued)