The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3335 by Angharad Copyright© 2021 Angharad

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This is a work of fiction any mention of real people, places or institutions is purely coincidental and does not imply that they are as suggested in the story.
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I looked again at the pond dipping net and the various pots and trays I had in a bag, a large supermarket bag. I pulled it all out to the table in the utility room and began sorting through the treasures. Some of this stuff I must have had since I was about twelve. two glass pipettes that the rubber had perished and gone all funny. Don't know if you can buy spare bulbs for them. I'd got some plastic ones somewhere, not bulbs but whole pipettes, one or two-millilitre things, we use loads in the labs.

In a pencil tin, I must have had since I was thirteen, Royal Sovereign Pencils, I bet they don't even make them anymore, I found a scalpel handle and some blades in paper with a blob of paraffin wax to hold them in place, a pair of fine-pointed forceps, a camel hair brush and a probe I made myself by forcing a sewing needle into a dip pen holder, having removed the nib. I think it was an old one of my dad's, the pen handle. There was an old teaspoon, and a pencil to write in my notebook, which has long since disappeared.

Considering, all I had to work with when I was a young teenager was John Clegg's, Observer's book of pond life and the larger format book which I had as a reward for saving that old chap's life, with the inscription, To Charlotte. Still, it's easier to say they got my name wrong as a girl than they got my name wrong and I was a boy at the time, or my parents thought so. I did love those dungarees.

Nowadays I have a shelf full of books on insects and invertebrates, their identification and ecology as far as it's known, plus a folder full of papers on these critters as well as on mammals and birds and wildflowers and even mosses and liverworts. I've got quite good at using keys providing the bits you're comparing aren't too much fiddle to find. Some of the stuff I see in my journals from entomological societies I belong to have incredible photos of slides of dissected and stained genitalia from some tiny fly I'd never even heard of, which makes the slides I used to make in university look a poor second. Then dissecting insects, especially to that level, is very much a very skilful level of activity both in identifying them and then dissecting out the bits you need to prove it and beyond my lowly skills.

But we all have to find our own levels in the things we do and compared to what I could do with a pond dipping net thirty years ago, I should be able to improve upon as an adult and seeing as we have a pond in the garden, I was checking out my kit for doing some dipping that afternoon. I'll mention it to the girls and maybe one or two will be interested in assisting me.

"Wotcha doin', Mummy?" asked Trish when she came to ask about what we were doing after lunch, which was imminent.

"I'm sorting out my pond dipping kit, why?"

"You gonna sell it on e-Bay?"

"No, I'm going to use it this afternoon."

"Where?"

"In the pond in the garden."

"Oh, I keep forgetting we have one out there."

"I don't know why, you've fallen in it often enough," I threw back at her.

"Is there anything in there worth catching?"

"I don't know, and until we've had a look, we won't know, will we?"

"Can I come with you?"

"Of course you can, sweetheart." I showed her all the stuff I had. These days the trays biologists use for examining their catches ate plastic, these were enamel ones and at least twice as heavy but less likely to bend or distort when you have water in them, and I now had help to cart the stuff out to the pond and I used to carry this on my own as a thirteen-year-old girl. Yes, girl. I didn't have a male puberty, so I was a girl - semantics - who cares?

The gong went for lunch and I left my equipment, went and washed my hands and ate the broccoli and salmon quiche that David had made with accompanying watercress salad. It was gorgeous and not too heavy for our challenging task of identifying invertebrates of a freshwater variety. Trish announced what we were doing and Hannah decided she'd come with us. I collected my x10 hand lens from my fieldwork jacket and also grabbed the hand lens I used to use as a girl, which was actually quite good. There was a shop that used to sell stamps and things for philatelists and they had lenses and also magnifiers on a stand. I've still got one with a flexible column on a heavy metal base, I got about the same time. I'd saved for it from my pocket money and my parents were quite pleased that I didn't spend it on sweets or worse but bought something useful. Nowadays, in my study, I have a table I use as a makeshift laboratory bench, it stands upon, along with the binocular microscope I 'borrowed' from the university, which is covered with a plastic bag to keep the dust off it. I also have a more modern stand magnifier with LED lighting and a cover to stop sunlight shining through it and burning the house down.

In the cupboard alongside the table, I have my own compound microscope and about a thousand boxed slides I made or bought when I was a student. I paid for it by selling slides to slackers, to replace it today would cost thousands, but it was a good instrument in those days and it's securely locked in its carry case in the locked cupboard.

We carted the stuff out to the pond, Trish took the net and I carried the bag and Hannah brought along one or two books we'd use to try and identify things. I hoped we'd all have some good fun.

Sadly, the first thing we pulled out of the pond wasn't an invertebrate but a rather well-deceased hedgehog. I was sure we had a ramp for them to scramble out on. We had but it had rotted and broken. I suspended our dipping, grabbed a spade and dug a grave for the expired tiggy winkle and then placed a new ramp in the one corner of the pond. Meanwhile, Trish had washed the net out under the tap we have outside the utility room.

We tried again and this time we had a couple of palmate or common newts, which we examined, photographed and replaced back in the water. I hope we didn't catch them too often. Hannah had a go and apart from pondweed, we had a couple of gammarids or freshwater shrimps, a hog-louse which is related to woodlice and had nothing to do with hogs, hedge or otherwise, and a dragonfly larva.

Using the book, with a bit of guidance from me, Trish decided our 'pond dragon' was a broad-bodied chaser, Libellula depressa and I explained how they have a jaw which lies under the head and extends out to catch its prey rather quickly and it will even take small fish or tadpoles but in turn may be eaten by other predators, even a larger version of its own species.

I explained that dragonflies were an ancient type of insect and had been around when the dinosaurs had inhabited the land and even before then, arising in the Carboniferous period about 400 million years ago. Then they were huge compared to modern versions due to the higher oxygen level of the atmosphere, havinf wingspans of over a foot. Imagine having one of those hit you while you were out on your bike.

We also caught loads of different fly larvae like those of the non-biting midges and mosquitoes which as larvae are fine but as adult females, they're after our blood to produce their eggs and when they bite they clear their stylets - their stabbing tubes - by passing some saliva through them which contains and anticoagulant and any bacteria or other contaminants they may have, malaria being one of them in hotter climes and this is how they disperse the disease, having picked it up from an infected person or animal earlier. We have Anopheles species in Northern Europe and malaria was a problem centuries ago, and was called ague. If climate change continues, which it will, as the temperatures climb, malaria could become a problem again in places we haven't had it for two hundred or more years.

Insects are such an important part of our world and while some are problematic spreading disease or damaging our food or homes, we would find life very difficult without the ecosystem services provided by so many, such as pollination which is well known for involving bees, both social and solitary but also wasps, beetles and possibly most of all, flies. We'd also be up to our eyeballs in manure if beetles and flies didn't remove it for us, some also clean up freshwater systems for us by filtering out particles of organic material, including our own waste. In some places insects are eaten as part of the normal diet and remember as well how we enjoy seeing things like butterflies or other creatures which feed upon insects, such as many species of birds, not to mention my beloved dormice, for which insects play quite a part in their summer diet.

We uncovered some beetle larvae and a few water bugs, some of which eat plant material and some which eat each other, including their own species. Insects are declining worldwide with North America and Northern Europe suggesting that the decline over the past twenty-five or so years could be as much as 75%, caused by habitat destruction and agricultural chemicals and not helped by climate change. I saw recently in a paper about bees that in the future we may lose our larger bees like bumblebees as the climate warms and that bees in the future may become smaller physically.

People usually can't accept how many insects we've lost until you ask them to recollect how dirty their windscreens got back in the 1980s and how few insects now get splattered on them because there simply aren't as many insects to collide with cars.

Having said that, a friend sent me some barn owl pellets to dissect and analyse and before i realised what was in the box, I had moths everywhere, yes, clothes moths, they feed upon the fur and feathers that end up in owl pellets not to mention the natural fibres in our homes of clothing and carpets and other fabrics.

The girls enjoyed their pond dipping, Danielle was playing football so wasn't about once she'd had lunch she was off to Reading, conveyed by the taxi firm we employed some months ago. Now she's got used to it and recognises some of the drivers - they're all women - she doesn't mind it half as much as she did at first.

A few days later and I was back in work and so were Simon and Stella, so Sarah really had her work cut out for her, but with a little help from David, she stopped them from trashing the house or holding huge parties.

Diane had had a good break and was quite chatty when we met on the first day back. It was the last thing I needed because I had so much work on my desk, including a need to do another report for the bank as they felt they wanted to emphasise their reputation as the world's greenest bank.

Not being aware of what other banks are or aren't doing, I don't know if that is a true description, but certainly, High Street are trying to maintain their green investment and I'm trying my best to make sure they do.