September was on the move. Summer drifted into its finale of stable weather before autumn ripened. At home, the sea was at its warmest, and I swam almost daily during those weeks. Then, like some sort of imposter car journalist, I suddenly found myself behind the wheel of an electric car outside Tiverton Parkway train station waiting to pick up my friend, Gina. You see, having become a rail connoisseur of late, I had grown bored of trains. Besides, I cannot lie – I really do like driving. (Sorry, Greta.) After all, a combustion engine, wheels and a progressive mind have lured us down the open road since 1892, when 20-year-old Frederick Bremer built the first four-wheeled petrol car in his home town of Walthamstow, London. Ah, those were the days, what! Anyway, here in the twenty-first century, I was keen to stay loyal to low-carbon solutions but was also motivated by a desire for timetable control. Besides, I wanted to test whether an electric car could rise to the hype. I felt as qualified in this endeavour as Jeremy Clarkson might at reporting the Harrogate Bridal Show (though I would give generously to see such journalism unfold).
My friend, Nicky, generously loaned me her BMW i3 – a small, fully electric high hatchback made of carbon fibre and aluminium. On the ugly side for a BMW, I’ll admit; even so, I was driving a BMW, and thus I blossomed into a certified lad. What Highway Code?
The i3 has certainly made waves in the electric vehicle market. I’m told its design is largely responsible for making electric cars more mainstream. Amazingly, sales of plug-in vehicles registered in the UK soared by 66 per cent in 2020 compared with the previous year, inching towards the government’s 10-point plan (note: ‘plan’) to ban new petrol and diesel car sales in 2030. The thought is that by 2050 we might (might) be carbon neutral.
The battery of an i3 is 50 per cent bigger than when it was first in production, delivering a 33-kilowatt-hour surge of energy to the wheels. The environmental credentials of electric cars are debatable. The life cycle of lithium-ion batteries is not exactly low-carbon. This soft, silvery alkali metal powers our laptops, phones and electric vehicles (EVs), and lithium carbonate is even used as a psychiatric medicine to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. An intensive mining process extracts it from the salt flats of South America, home to more than half of the global supply. Estimates suggest that nearly half a million gallons of water are needed to bring 1 tonne of lithium to the surface.
Recycling lithium batteries is difficult and expensive. Disposing of them can leak toxins into the environment. Widescale infrastructure to support this process isn’t there yet, and in the UK, we park a quarter of our cars on the streets, which takes the spark out of charging an EV easily. The carbon fibre body structure of the i3 (while lightweight and helpful for battery life) uses about 14 times as much energy in its production as steel, the more traditional car body. The race to electrify all vehicles is by no means an easy win. But then again, what is?
My destination in the borrowed i3 was Knepp Castle Estate. You may have heard of it – West Sussex’s pioneering hinterland. Sitting alongside North Ronaldsay on a birder’s bucket list, no doubt – and with good reason. Since 2001, more than 3,500 acres (1,416 hectares) have undergone a steady, astonishing transformation from decades of intensive farming to a redefined wilderness under the Gatwick flight path. Fences abdicated their reign so grazers could roam year-round. Wild deer, semi-feral ponies, and de-domesticated cattle and pigs were reunited with a bygone, wood pasture landscape. Relict floodplains were found and restored like an old painting. Water returned, writing a new story across a land that had shackled its course for too long. And then the wildlife came. Peregrine falcons, nightingales, turtle doves, purple emperor butterflies, long-eared bats (hello again!) and dung beetles. Some of these species we thought would never come back.
This is ‘rewilding’ or ‘ecological restoration’. Rewilding is often misunderstood as the process of returning a landscape to its raw, natural form. Unfortunately, humans have already toyed so much with the land that the past is out of reach. In fact, both these phrases describe the process of allowing nature to have more of a say in how the land answers to change within the boundaries that remain.
Perhaps that all sounds a bit limp and fanciful? A time-travelling landscape pocked with large herbivores and flights of rare butterflies in place of combine harvesters? The trade-off there might seem potentially problematic. But there is no denying that ‘rewilding’ is a bit of a buzzword these days, even accounting for the word’s many, shall we say, interpretations. Knepp is a triumph and shows us what could be if we let go. It is a reminder that positive change can exist within a human lifetime if we want.
‘Rewilding is all about creating novel ecosystems and allowing nature to respond,’ Isabella (‘Issy’) Tree told me once. Issy and her husband, conservationist Charlie Burrell, are the landowners at Knepp. She documents its inspirational journey of change in her remarkable book, Wilding. Friends, if you haven’t read it – you must.
Naturally, I was visiting Knepp because I had read they had an impressive record of dung and associated beetles. Yes, dung – as in animal poo, excrement, droppings, etc. A couple of years before, in 2018, a master’s student counted a staggering 11,633 dung beetles on Knepp over five days. To those so inclined, such faecal real estate is not just impressive: it’s enviable. Strange, I thought, to gather such numbers when 25 per cent of dung beetle species across the UK are rare nationally, with most lumped into the ‘endangered’, ‘vulnerable’ or ‘near-threatened’ categories. It seemed I had entered into a bit of a dung-shaped dilemma. So off to Knepp I went in my sartorial electric ride, hoping to discover the secret of its dung-beetle success.
I hadn’t the faintest bloody idea what I was doing. Having only recently grasped how to ‘Pay at Pump’ for petrol at my local supermarket, the combination of figuring out how to plug in the car to charge it and maintain sufficient charge en route to my destination had a strong chance of bruising my mood. Ironic that someone so reliant on plug-in devices would feel intimidated by a plug-in car. I’m a good driver, but I felt suddenly inept after only 3 miles in the i3. Until then, I had only ever driven a manual car, my dad’s beloved silver Ford Focus, and I was fooled by the minimalism that comes with having a battery in place of an engine. My left hand grappled for a gear stick that wasn’t there. My left foot followed suit, plunging involuntarily for a clutch that also wasn’t there. And as I lifted my foot off the accelerator, I kept worrying the battery had drained because, suddenly, the car would brake noticeably, often slowing to a standstill when approaching a junction or traffic light.
Most EVs have regenerative braking, a sustainable way to slow down and conserve battery life. I’m interested. Some say regenerative braking is so effective that you can cruise London’s streets in an i3 without ever touching the brake pedal. Once you get used to these quirks, you are in for a bit of a wheeze. For a start, EVs are eerily quiet. Potentially deadly for cyclists but good for viewing unsuspecting birds. Next, these rides are brisk. The i3 packs a particular punch, being one of the few EVs to send electricity to its rear wheels instead of the front wheels. Safe to say, I became well versed in shaming some diesel and petrol cars, pulling away from roundabouts and green lights rather spectacularly. (Between you and me, I may have morphed into an archetypal BMW driver in those moments.)
I mentioned I was travelling with a friend this time. Like me, Gina enjoys having a lovely time outside, and she is exceptionally talented at spotting wildlife and telling people about it. So, I thought she would be good to have on hand to alert me to all the things I wasn’t noticing when we got to Knepp. Being around Gina also has me on the edge of a laugh at all times, whether we’re sourcing 2 a.m. chips in Bristol or navigating deepest darkest Cornwall looking for visiting whales and trying to educate the world about their migration on social media (before furiously deleting all evidence when we realised we were filming a group of rocks). Gina and I have always joked that we are like brother and sister, though which of us is the brother in this relationship remains up for discussion.
A long road lay ahead of us, but we managed three hours driving to Petersfinger near Salisbury before the battery needed a boost. St Peter (and his finger) may be enamoured with the fact that there were numerous ‘pod points’ to charge the car here, and we found our first in a Morrisons car park. My uncle had recommended an app called Zap-Map that highlights the nearest charging points along your route, ranging in price and length of charging from ‘rapid’ to ‘slow’. New to the app, I was slow to clock on to the various options, and we were in that car park for more than an hour, inadvertently having chosen the slowest. At least charging turned out to be easy, requiring no more than the well-practised manoeuvre of plugging cable into socket. It was reasonably priced, too, with nearly 80 per cent of the battery restored for less than a fiver. Sure, an electric car like this might set you back more than £30,000, but there is some satisfaction to be found in not losing £60 every other week to a petrol mogul.
The car’s realistic range was about 140 miles, and toying with the numbers became the game of the journey. Much like fuel levels, battery life is influenced by all sorts of things in the car: air conditioning, the radio, heating, satnav. You can watch the miles pile back on or drain, depending on what the driver and passenger are demanding at any given moment. Somewhat synonymous with how fossil fuels are consumed, to be honest. However, unlike fuel, you can increase your battery life while on the move if you wish. For example, after a second top-up beyond Salisbury, the car’s display showed we only had enough charge left to travel 73 miles, yet Knepp was still another 94 miles away. Thus began a fervent appeal to the theatre of battery-saving that only the most committed of us hone over the years.
Little did I know I had been training for this moment for the past decade. Every ploy I had ever tried to prolong a rechargeable device gave me strength. Game very much on. And much to Gina’s frustration on a muggy September afternoon, I turned off the air conditioning, satnav and radio. Steadfast in the slow lane, we maintained a modest 63 miles per hour. I barely touched the brake as though it were a bed of coals. Silent pleas were sent to the electricity overlords, asking us to be spared another hour in a supermarket car park. Get me to the beetles.
We peeled off a gridlocked M27 at last. A27 flowed into A24 and branched into tributaries of smaller, quieter roads. Woodpecker Lane. Swallow Lane. Roadworks, traffic and charging had tallied our total driving time to more than 8 hours. Yes, sure, we could have flown to Dubai within that time to promote our new line of #vegan lip tint. But we preferred playing restless children attempting a low-carbon journey to wonderland who really needed the toilet (and desperately wanted to see some dung).
I’ve been mulling for some time how to sweet talk dung to you. I am truly curious as to your immediate thoughts. Are you repulsed? Has a bad experience prompted lifelong aversion? Or are you simply indifferent? However you might feel about dung, I’m pretty sure we like beetles. A friend of mine once said she sees them as ‘indestructible’, which suggests a level of admiration, I think. Even so, when it comes to understanding their actual function, it’s easier to move on, isn’t it? Yet, it occurs to me that dung, in all its forms, offers us a rare opportunity for lifelong education. Indeed, we’ve learned that our grey long-eared bat prefers a more flamboyant approach to defecation. I can’t say the same myself, but I did enter a regrettable phase for about a year:
Parent: ‘How was school?’
Me: ‘Poo.’
‘Poo.’
‘What time is Rachel coming over?’
‘Poo.’
This most favourite retort was maddening for everyone else and hilarious for eight-year-old me. Aside from the obvious, a good many synonyms describe this most fundamental of biological happenings, some of which I will experiment with throughout this chapter: egesta, discharge, ordure (sounds like an ordeal), ejecta, turd (she will never admit it, but this is my mum’s favourite!) and, my new favourite, ejectamenta (some sort of private school Latin motto?). Anyway, the fact is, the world wouldn’t exist without it, and animal droppings buttress our countryside like little else.
Predictably, we’ve been swift to recognise dung’s value for our society. Dried dung has long been bricks and mortar for many communities around the world. Across India, dung is still culturally regarded as some sort of universal blessing. Where trees are sporadic, people burn dung as fuel. Our crops have been fertilised with dung since farming dawned more than 8,000 years ago. Yet, it seems that a sort of global dung divergence has emerged. Some cultures continue to harvest fresh dung for worthy, medicinal purposes. Oklahoma holds an annual World Cow Chip Throwing Contest at which contestants compete to throw dried chunks of cowpat. The record stands at 81.1 metres, unbeaten since 1981.
Cows, of course, augment our lives in other ways. Milk? Useful! Ice cream? Here for it. Cheese? Stupid question. But here’s the thing – I would confidently bet money on the fact that you have never, ever concerned yourself with another by-product of a dairy cow. Nor have you worried for the UK’s dwindling dung, let alone lamented the average consistency, health or content of it in a standard cattle field. Well, I’m with you. Until recently, I rarely thought about dung either, unless it worked its way onto my shoe. Overlooking dung is just the way things have panned out over the years, I guess. But the best dung is rapidly becoming the stuff of legend. And it’s high time we sorted that shit out and allowed ourselves to be schooled by the humble pat and the life – yes, life – within it.
UK dung beetles are part of a beetle ‘superfamily’ (and it is quite super!) called Scarabaeoidea, and within this superfamily are two smaller families: Geotrupidae and Scarabaeidae. It’s easy to feel intimidated by the sheer number of vowels in these names; never mind try to get your head around the beetles they describe. The main point to flag is that these families comprise of ‘tunnellers’, ‘rollers’ and ‘dwellers’ (I imagine most human families could assign each of those labels to at least one of their members). You may recall scenes from nature documentaries that show Tiny Sturdy Beetle™ rolling an enormous ball of dung across the savannah? That visual won’t serve you well in the British Isles, I’m afraid. Dor and minotaur1 beetles in the UK sometimes push rabbit pellets about wantonly, but with nowhere near the same panache as beetles in other climes. But let’s not hold that against them.
Dung beetles, of course, have an appetite for the brown stuff. Like it or not, they quite literally live for it. Yes, other beetle families feed on dung, but about 60 species of ‘true’ dung beetles live in the UK. And it’s these species that ‘truly’ eat the dung itself. As you’ll come to realise, lots of other beetles – like predatory rove beetles – live in the dung pat itself, looking to feast on fly maggots, soft-bodied invertebrates, fungi and other beetles. But these are ‘dung loving’ – as opposed to having a true palate for it. Beetles themselves are the most diverse group of insects, with more than 450,000 species alive across the planet today. That’s 25 per cent of animal life so far described. Beetle bodies have three sections: head, thorax and abdomen, encased by an external (‘exo’) skeleton. Language reveals more. In Latin, beetles are called ‘Coleoptera’. And in Greek, coleoptera translates to ‘sheath wing’. It turns out the beetle’s unique selling point is its double-wing situation. Rigid, armour-like wings, known as elytra or wing-cases, on the outside protect the delicate flight wings underneath, much like a sword rests in its scabbard. This tells us that the true defence for many beetles is, in fact, a quick, aerial getaway.
Most animals contribute to ecosystem function, but dung beetles are the Amazon Prime of this functionality. Resolute in their mission and disarming in their efficiency, they would probably take over the world if they could. Bees and pollination are an obvious force across the countryside. Somehow, though, dung beetles remain forever in their shadow, despite the fact they often occupy the same environment and offer competitive ecosystem services. Dung beetles are the (travel-sized) operations managers of the ground we stand on.
Continuing this brief detour into an office environment and dung beetles would be the fast talkers, the multitaskers – ultra-responsive, reactive, contributing noteworthy points in a board meeting while simultaneously texting, tweeting and ordering flowers for their mum. Not necessarily sociable, but the sort to wear a beret to post-work drinks and feel good about it – such assuredness they exert in their role here on Earth. As we’ll find out, dung beetles trigger a bewildering division of labour among thousands of other species, all playing a part in removing a pat from the field and restoring the integrity of the soil. Soil that, in the UK, stores more than 10 billion tonnes of carbon. Soil at risk of total fertility loss over the next 30 years, the degradation of which already costs England and Wales alone more than £1 billion every year.
Arriving at Knepp shortly after 5 p.m., we staggered stiff and slightly dazed into reception like a couple of occupational hazards. I had arranged to meet with Penny Green, the ecologist for the estate (a storybook waiting to be written, surely?) for a quick whistle-stop tour of the beetles and turds likely to be on offer for the next 24 hours. Mainly for aesthetic reasons, I hoped to see a violet dor beetle. Dung beetles are around throughout the year, but violet dor beetles are often seen more towards autumn. Five years ago, Penny discovered one during a survey of Knepp, a stunning, iridescent hulk of a thing. Violet dor beetles hadn’t been recorded in Sussex for more than 50 years. While making tea for us in her office, she described how, over the 15 years of landscape regeneration here, the return of browsing mammals and woodland pasture had produced enough organic dung of every shape, size, texture and scent to support an abundance of beetles. ‘Organic dung is missing across so much of our landscape,’ explained Penny. ‘In most sites, dung beetle populations are naturally low because they’ve been surviving on anything they can find. But if you rewild – and increase dung by having livestock out and about and not kept in barns – give it 10 years or so, and the beetles will be self-sustaining.’
Even from the car park, Gina and I sensed we were somewhere special. Not just because we had heard about Knepp and its delights for years, but because there were large yellow signs around the site informing us of ‘free-roaming animals’. (And if you don’t perform an internal cartwheel at that prospect, then you need to go sort yourself out and come back to me when you’re ready.) The roar of the road felt close, but noises that we had never heard before were coming from bushes opposite the car. Utterly strange, yet familiar all at once. Trundling our things in a wheelbarrow to the camping ground and catching our hair in low-hanging branches, we happily entered our 24-hour escape room.
A short walk from the car park nestled in a meadow framed by ancient woodland, Knepp’s campsite is quite the hype – for campers and glampers alike. Choosing a sunny corner pitch by the rain-water shower block, we faffed with sleeping bags and fly-sheets, soon prioritising dinner in a nearby pub. On our walk into Dial Post village, the light had been golden and low, revealing the most enormous red deer stag we had ever seen, relaxing in a copse, almost within touching distance to our left. Stopping dead, we gripped each other’s forearms magnetised. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if rainbows started coming out of his arse, to be honest,’ murmured Gina.
Later, on the walk back to the campsite, I was so full of food and red wine I half wondered whether I might be with twins. The night was bright and, although distant cities ensured the sky wasn’t totally dark, a single shooting star streaked overhead. Prepping our tents for a windy night, it took me a minute to realise the background grunting I could hear was not from the neighbouring tent but rather from the adjacent field where a couple of Tamworth pigs ruffled the pasture’s edge. In Wilding, Isabella Tree explains how wild boar roughed up the edges of pasture like this in ye olde England, overturning soil and stimulating new growth across the understorey. Hunted to extinction in the seventeenth century, wild boars haven’t played a role in our countryside for many years.
The 1976 Dangerous Wild Animals Act banned the release of wild boar onto any estate – Knepp included. But the team at Knepp noticed they could replicate a wild boar’s influence in a less threatening form. So Tamworth pigs – ginger, large and loveable – were recruited as the understudy. (And very successfully.) Hailing from Staffordshire and a rare breed themselves, Tamworth pigs have an affinity for oak woodland, snuffling acorns and snorting roots, earthworms and everything in between. Tilling the soil like a traditional plough, Knepp’s pigs open doors for species that haven’t danced at this party for centuries. One of Knepp’s most celebrated achievements is the rebound of the purple emperor butterfly – an outlandish, showy thing that had no place here before the pigs came. But, thanks to said pigs and their ability to encourage the growth of larval food plants like sallow, the butterflies returned, and Knepp is now home to the UK’s largest breeding population of purple emperor butterflies. Can’t argue with that.
Waking early to the sound of more pigs and even the odd owl – a tawny, I think – was idyllic obviously – the stuff of stories. I wondered whether, once upon a time, the whole of England woke to such an LP. Planes formed an orderly aerial queue into Gatwick. Quickly realising our drastic oversight in the cooking department, Gina and I stole into the campsite’s forbidden ‘glamping kitchen’ on the hunt for caffeine and some healing baked goods. I would have died for a croissant. But, alas, none were to be found.
Further drastic oversight confirmed that many other nature seekers also visit Knepp, and they were also up with the dawn pig chorus in feverish lust for said caffeine and healing baked goods. Soon the kitchen featured a small group of sleepy waifs and strays, swapping milk splashes and spoons of instant coffee along with our hopes and dreams for a weekend in the wild. The banter was niche and grossly nerdy, everything that is inaccessible about conservation in a way. But most of these people exert a special kind of warmth that is a challenge to dislike in person.
‘To the dinosaurs!’ shouted Gina, stepping forth through an enormous steel gate as we entered the Southern Block – the wildest of the three areas that divide up the estate around the roads. A violent clash of red deer stags locking antlers met us immediately. Testosterone simmered on the brink of boil, ready for the rut. A something-spotted woodpecker sought refuge in a nearby oak, the roots of which massaged a ground that looked untidy, chapped even, but not unpleasant, especially when a nuthatch bounced around the folds of the root. (By the way, if you ever find yourself vexed applying liquid eyeliner, Google a nuthatch and thank me later.) Deadwood relaxed into pasture, around which skirted a last breath of ragwort. Hedgerows were strewn with sloes. Gina darted around with her camera like a sheepdog rounding the flock. Everything just felt bigger. And I liked it. I really, really liked it.
It turns out that not many people dedicate time to the pursuit of dung and associated beetles. Somehow, prodding poo for answers is not aspirational. But, luckily for us, Darren Mann exists. Nobody does dung quite like Darren. He works for the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and together with his wife, Ceri, they run the National Recording Scheme for dung beetles in the UK. He offers management advice to landowners in a bid to work land in favour of dung beetles as a remedy to improve landscape health. I caught up with him over Zoom. His office was classically academic, books upon books. Chaotic but meticulous. ‘I’m one of the few academics who can admit that they do shit research – I literally spend all of my time looking in shit. You’ve got this whole ecosystem just in this one piece of crap.’ He recounted tales of bug hunting through the Hindu Kush mountain range in northern Pakistan, travelling by yak during a blizzard to a shepherd’s hut and burning yak dung for warmth. ‘Smoky, but not unpleasant,’ he added.
While on furlough during the pandemic, instead of nurturing sourdough starters, Darren and Ceri took their campervan around the UK, filling gaps in dung beetle records and building the national map. They have even rediscovered species that ecologists thought were extinct. Although based in the UK, Darren travels the world, piecing together what makes dung so vital. He’s the kind of person who recalls his experience with elephant poo as ‘like being a kid in a sweet shop’ or who enthusiastically claims there is ‘nothing better than breaking open a piece of dung in your hand … you never know what you’ll find’. He reels off scientific names of beetles as lyrically as a waiter might relate the contents of the specials board to you at a fancy restaurant. Hectic diaries pushed my call with Darren to after my trip to Knepp, but crikey, it was worth it. Over Zoom, I was teleported back into the lecture hall. It was probably the best lecture of my life. ‘Most people don’t realise the UK even has proper dung beetles. It’s not even in their periphery. But,’ an almost wicked laugh, ‘we would know if they weren’t here – there would be shit everywhere.’ According to Darren, people just get bored with beetles. I agree, but I think it’s because they don’t know them.
Time to get into the basics. A grassroots approach will do, so we’ll start with the pat itself. The average dairy cow individually produces up to 15 tonnes of the stuff per year. Figures from 2018 estimate nearly 10 million cattle roam the UK’s pastures. That’s a lot of ordure – around 80 million tonnes. But there’s a lot in a pat too. Essentially, it’s a dump of undigested plant mulch, bacteria, nitrogen, phosphate and sulphur – all of which the soil would like back at some point. In her office, prior to our dung foray, Penny described with wonderful hand gestures how a healthy pat has rings like an Audi logo. Three to four concentric circles. ‘It has structure: peaks, craters and a good crust. Rather than a great big runny mess that we are normalising across the countryside.’ One could interpret the quality of a chocolate brownie with the same criteria. Surely the best have a good crust but remain gooey in the middle? Well, it’s the same with a good pile of mammal excrement.
Healthy pats are good for science, too, as Darren explained how a single pat could give you information on the soil type, age of dung and location in England simply by analysing the species that colonise it. ‘It’s why insects are so useful in forensics,’ he remarked, ‘they have a very specific biology that can be traced.’
You may have noticed that Earth is regulated by patterns or cycles. The four temperate seasons, day and night, sleep and wake and eyebrow thickness are a predictable few. Dung decomposition is another. The whole process doesn’t take long, but it must happen. And it’s one of the few cycles that we can follow right through to completion if we so wish. Naturally, on a dung foray, you’ll encounter pats of different ages. There’s a sweet spot of time for beetles to monopolise a pat, ranging from seconds to a couple of days. Charlie Burrell of Knepp Estate is notorious for lying alongside dung, ‘straight from the rectum!’, and watching how dor and other beetles assemble within seconds. ‘The great, glorious trifecta!’ exclaimed Darren – praising the cow-dung-insect love triangle.
I must mention some elements of dung beetle hardware. Beetles are among the most successful animals on Earth. In the cast of dung beetles, this is in part because evolution has garnished them with the shovels, helmets and sensory equipment needed to negotiate Turd Mountain. Since they must also have sex on the pat itself, they need various adornments to engage in battle for a mate. At this point, you may feel overwhelmed by the imagery. But, like the beetle itself, we soldier on.
Beetles here range from 2–68 millimetres long, and their decor includes spikes, rhino-like horns, knuckle-duster ridges and more. Head-to-head combat between dung beetles often occurs inside a pat, with all these prongs and protrusions ensuring quite the conflict. Observe a close up of a particularly ornate male, and they honestly look like a walking Swiss Army knife: nail file, blade, letter-opener, toothpick. If a crisis occurs and you have a dung beetle to hand, I’m pretty sure you’d be covered.
Claiming a fresh dump requires serious planning from these insects. Distinctive antennal ‘clubs’ – tiny feathery fronds rammed to the seams with sensory cells – are helpful. Effectively, this is a dung beetle’s nose. Sensory organs often cover the body of a dung beetle but are also in abundance in the antennae. What’s hilarious is that while most insects use these kinds of appendages to seduce and sniff out erotic hormones of a potential mate, dung beetles use them to sniff out faecal particles until their eyesight can lead them to it. Because it is but nature’s will that a successful shag directly depends on the availability of good dung. The pat is where the magic happens, and the mere smell of it thrusts a dung beetle into utter rapture. And here is why dung beetles are having such a rubbish time across the UK: quality dung that supports this essential dynamic is decreasing. What dung is left is rarely organic, and the rest is often in the wrong place at the wrong time. Instead of roaming in pasture, cattle are moving indoors in barns during the winter. Such disruption to the precious dung cycle leaves dung beetles short of food and a mate – sad times.
Once a pat is ambushed, the moon landing begins, which can happen quickly. Some ecologists observed up to 50 beetles arriving by land and air in less than 20 minutes of a cow having a dump. What a superb fleet of horny dung-miners! ‘These beetles are usually the first to arrive at a pat and initiate breakdown, along with dung-feeding flies,’ Darren beamed. He explained how the first beetles to arrive ferry teams of bacteria and fungal spores from the last pat they visited and inoculate the new dung with early successional microbes. You can think of this as analogous to eating kefir yoghurt to improve your gut health – it’s often a good idea. A small army of predatory mites no bigger than a millimetre (and oddly similar looking to sesame seeds) hitch a ride on these beetles too – ‘like an Uber’, Darren shrugged. Once at the fresh pat, they leap off and feast on the larvae of flies buried within. ‘Often, these flies are pests to farmers, so having this predator-prey dynamic within the dung is vital.’
Some dung beetles in the Onthophagus branch of the scarab beetle superfamily are so ornate that they look like a cross between a gladiator and a tank. One of the UK’s remaining six species in this group is even the same hue as the British Army’s combat uniform – olive-green and field-brown flecks. Its head assumes the shape of a spade, presumably for shovelling dung about. The legs of tunnelling dung beetles remarkably resemble trowels, and they assist in deep excavation. And it’s this process of working through the dung – to feed, mate and breed – that aerates it.
‘If dung is left on its own, it undergoes anaerobic respiration of microbes, which does not end well,’ admitted Darren, explaining how this leads to a concept known as ‘pasture fouling’, where dung is left unchanged on the pasture. Not only does this lock up nutrients, but it also kills the grass below. Bad news for crops and livestock alike. ‘But get beetles in there doing their thing, and this buries the dung in the soil, opening it up to other insects that will continue to decompose it.’ This ‘bioturbation’ adds nitrogen and phosphates to the soil, enriching its composition and increasing grass growth. Once the dung is in the soil, rove beetles (dung lovers) arrive, feasting on fly larvae and eggs. And then the worms come. They, too, smell the new dung, taking sections the beetles have perforated and tugging it further down on a deeper journey into the soil.
These successional waves of invertebrates mean that, in theory, one field with a few healthy cattle could constitute an entire archipelago of life – something that other species have learned to monopolise at Knepp. Before I embarked on my own dung survey, Penny had commented how a single pat with its city of insects could attract jackdaws, long-eared bats, horseshoe bats, owls and many other species, all of which want, and need, a slice of the action. Even the white storks – reborn in a landmark project within Knepp after hundreds of years and now free flying – feed directly on the dung beetles themselves. Beetles offer all of this rent-free. What noble and helpful tenants.
Predictably, Darren’s zest has sharpened the curiosity of many. Mary-Emma Hermand is an entomology postgraduate from Reading. She and I are of similar age and jostled similar meanderings in our early 20s. Conversation flowed easily between us. She described a nine-month placement with Darren at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History during her Zoology degree as the best year of her university life. ‘I remember being the only one in my group at uni who genuinely enjoyed the insect stuff,’ she admitted during our call. ‘But I found a kindred spirit in Darren and could nerd out about beetles with him and not feel weird about it, you know? It’s easy to bond over the overlooked.’ Mary-Emma’s postgraduate research has helped expose the chasm in our understanding of dung beetles in the British Isles. She focuses on ‘cryptic’ species: two or more species that look almost identical with the naked eye but are genetically different.
Aphodius fimetarius is a native European dung beetle first described by a guy called Linnaeus2 in 1758. But, in 2001, a genetic study discovered that its population actually comprised two discrete species that looked unbelievably similar. Mary-Emma sought to quantify what exactly the differences were between both A. fimetarius and A. pedellus. Using Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping techniques and Met Office data, an overlap emerged. Mary-Emma shared her screen with me during the call to reveal a map of the UK. Little dots showed A. fimetarius was less tolerant of colder areas and preferred sandy soils, even up into the Outer Hebrides. In contrast, A. pedellus was found in areas 2ºC colder.
An unconfirmed hunch from Darren and Mary-Emma showed that these distributions align with the Gulf Stream, which brings warmth to the UK and north-west Europe. In 2020, the Gulf Stream was at its weakest for more than a thousand years, which is likely connected to climate instability. ‘It all seems to be linked with temperature – our main interest now is the impact of climate change within a very important group of beetles. I ended up with more questions than I had answers!’ Mary-Emma confessed. ‘You can lose biodiversity without ever knowing it was there. And that scares me. That really scares me.’
What’s more studied – yet still in desperate need of further investigation – is the role of dung beetles in the carbon cycle. Climate/carbon cycle feedback is a vital area of research to help us meet Paris Agreement targets (i.e. limiting global temperature rise to 1.5ºC). Rebecca Varney is a PhD student working in a team from the University of Exeter. She led a study in 2020 that mathematically modelled the turnover time of carbon in the soil under different temperature scenarios. The paper’s intensity of equations and formulae made me feel a bit sick, so I gave her a quick call instead. ‘The uncertainty is just huge,’ she told me. ‘We’re working rapidly to reduce that given how vital soil is in the fight against climate change.’
Vital indeed. According to the United Nations, the global population of livestock surpasses the transportation industry in the emission of greenhouse gases. A third of global methane, a gas more toxic than carbon dioxide, comes from the farts and dumps spread across pasture. You’d be forgiven for thinking beetles play some sort of role in locking that up in the ground during the bioturbation process, in the same way that seagrass does in our seas. Darren had assisted with a 2013 experiment in Finland whose findings suggested dung beetles can help to do this, and I asked Darren whether it was fair to call dung beetles an ‘ally’ in the fight against the climate crisis. ‘That experiment was artificial,’ he admitted. ‘Nature is just so bloody complicated, so if you remove ninety per cent of life within a pat, then measure its carbon sequestration, the findings don’t reflect reality.’
Darren continued by iterating the famine of research in this area. Nearly 10 years on, and only two or three studies have followed suit, he explained. In 2020, one of them concluded that dung beetles don’t actively accelerate a notable reduction in emissions and simply cannot match the pace at which they are released. They can’t bury dung fast enough to make a marked difference to emissions. ‘We don’t have enough data to make broad conclusions. But dung beetles burying dung and introducing microbes can only have a positive impact on greenhouse gas reduction. There’s no other way around it.’
I’m almost impressed that people have developed a different way of thinking in a relatively short space of time. Essentially, the animals around Knepp are livestock: cows, pigs and ponies. But these animals assume a completely different guise when they are permitted to Be! Free! throughout pasture. Darren described how along with landscape connectivity, we’re losing an essential combination of dung types. My mind raced. Take deer, for example. Roaming the UK since the Ice Age, their smaller droppings prevent big beetles from breeding on them. In areas with deer (and their small poo), this tips the balance in favour of smaller beetle species. ‘So, you get these extinction filters depending on what dung is available. If you have only cattle in the landscape, you’ll oust smaller dung-feeding beetles. If you have only deer, you’ll miss out on the big ones. You need a mosaic of dung to facilitate the whole system.’
And this is what is so hot about Knepp. The astonishing library of dung on offer makes you want to whisper, Hey, this is what the countryside should look like … ‘We’ve got dung from longhorn cattle, three different deer species, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs, foxes, badgers …’ Penny reeled off the specials board. And as I listened to her, I thought about how there will be dung beetles that specialise in all of these types of ejectamenta (I just wanted to say it once!) Penny had described Darren as the ‘Tasmanian Devil of Dung’ and admitted it was incredible to watch him at work. It turns out achieving faecal dexterity requires a lot of skill.
Following a smiley overview of the dung dos and don’ts around Knepp, Penny had left us to it. Plodding about the Southern Block, Gina and I sought out the best of the pats with which to receive our belated baptism of dung. Long-tailed tits that looked like flying teaspoons darted about an echo chamber of birdsong. We caught only flashes of them between the leaves, which flickered in the morning sun. A longhorn scratched an itch on a piece of deadwood while a small group of fallow deer assembled like parents at the school gates before leaping into a muscle of copse. Gina nearly lost it when a male fox, tangerine and glossy, trotted past. ‘Fuck me … this is amazinggg,’ she whispered.
I made up for what I lacked in trowel-like appendages and spade-shaped head with latex gloves and a clueless demeanour. Penny gave us very little instruction other than to plunge right in, wrist deep, and carefully sift the pat to search for life inside. But she had kindly armed me with the necessary wherewithal to inhabit the pat mentally (probably more helpful). Searching for living beings in animal waste still seemed a bit mad, but there was no alternative to becoming engrossed. Its texture was satisfying to manipulate, and, crucially, the smell was actually not bad. What we so quickly label as ‘foul’ smelled earthy, nutritious. As I rummaged in the middle of the pat, yellow dung flies mated around its edges.
Below the crusts of many pats, I mapped tunnel entrances created by those first colonisers after the oh-holy-excretion event. Some tunnels were drilled directly below the surface, some to the side. It’s within these tunnels that brood chambers exist and the larvae develop. Removing as small a section of the lid as possible, the grass and matter the longhorn had digested was easily discernible. The dung that coated my palms and (parts of) my thighs was generous but not unpleasant. I wasn’t grossed out, more like struck dumb. Because throughout the pats I poked, tiny life forms appeared. Tiny C-shaped larvae rested in the folds, grey-white and already with defined heads and mouthparts. Our sesame-seed-shaped mites scurried the interior topography of Turd Mountain. A ground beetle marched within it like a freedom fighter. Things were happening here that I’d never seen or considered. I didn’t know what I was looking at, but for a minute, as I held court with a cow pat, I forgot that this scene is rare.
Upon returning home the following week, like a good student, I painstakingly sorted through and sent photos of turds to Darren. His reply simply read:
Hi. Larvae are one of the ‘lesser dung beetles’. Most likely Aphodius fossor. Diurnal. Hard to be sure from pics.
Best,
D.
A late arrival to a fresh pat, A. fossor generally flies at dawn and dusk. But records show it can be active during the day, depending on the local temperature and humidity levels. Eggs are laid within the crust and spend the summer maturing into larvae, which is the stage at which I saw them. Darren explained how the larvae of the A. fossor species rely on the cattle dung for their survival. They can eat deer poo but cannot breed on it. ‘They need cattle dung in open pasture. Else it’s game over.’
Two of the dor beetle species at Knepp are nocturnal. It occurred to me that instead of plying myself with wine and fantasies of magical stags with Gina the previous night, I should have diligently surveyed Knepp’s nocturnal quantity. Feeling a similar resolve build as I had felt at my harbour porpoise fail earlier in the summer, I decided I was OK with only seeing dung beetle larvae. I later concluded it a high honour and privilege to have witnessed an extraordinary species at the very start of their subterranean journey.
I asked Mary-Emma what it is about dung beetles that make them so forgettable. ‘We just don’t recognise their importance. They’re overlooked because they’re unseen.’ Speaking about the horse fields near where she lives, she told me that ‘dung is no longer a resource. People tidy it up. Get rid of it. Take it away. That’s just what we do now.’
The funny thing about British dung is its satirical exposé of our bad habits. Shit happens, right? And with this in mind, I’m aware that we haven’t yet talked about why dung beetles are in trouble. Yes, if there were more dung beetles, that could be good for our greenhouse gas situation, but most dung beetles are ‘pretty screwed’, according to Darren. Information on the remaining dung beetle species exists primarily thanks to the records that he and Ceri have built. And even those population datasets are somewhat lopsided because there’s hardly anyone else out there bothering to count them.
The truth is we are experiencing a rather severe drop in our supply of, um, droppings. Supply is truly reliant on demand. Rich dung with peaks, troughs and crusts is increasingly hard to come by because, like all mess, we simply clear it up like good boys and girls. ‘A regular part of intensive farming nowadays is locking cattle away in sheds during large parts of the year and treating dung as passive waste,’ Darren said. ‘But this blocks the vital outdoor cycles that dung facilitates.’ In an inconsistent bid to improve grassland, we’re neglecting the natural richness that comes with the unimproved. Progressively warm and wet winters are bringing cows inside. ‘[Grassland] is cut so early for silage that it never reaches maturity,’ continued Darren. ‘It’s then so full of nitrogen that when the cows feed on it during the winter, they get diarrhoea. We’re rapidly on our way to ruining the countryside.’
Many cattle are also so heavily medicated with anti-wormers and antibiotics that their faeces are a runny, foul-smelling mess, devoid of life anyway. This inhospitable dung is a world away from the invertebrate metropolis that inhabits a pat at Knepp. Much research, notably from the University of Bristol, has demonstrated the danger posed to any insect that processes this medicated dung. It’s essentially insecticide. They’re going to die. Introduce some heavy rains into the mix, and we’ve got a genuinely shitty, druggy mess entering our watercourses. No, thanks.
Remember, the poo itself is food for many species. In places like Knepp, where the animals do not have routine wormers prescribed to them and are free to roam all year round, the beetles have a reliable food source, and they honeypot the area. Elsewhere in the countryside, the prospect is much bleaker. Darren sighed: ‘There’s a worrying lack of food for beetles. When animals are active throughout the year, they need continuity. And as they have annual life cycles, if the next piece of suitable dung isn’t within their flight range, they’ll go extinct within the year. It only takes one bad season of dung for a whole beetle species to disappear.’
Intensive farming isn’t exiting UK landscapes anytime soon; it’ll probably increase. But it’s in the best interest of our livestock if we prioritise dung beetle diversity. Figures from 2015 estimate that dung beetles might be saving the UK cattle industry £367 million per year in services like pest reduction, better quality grazing due to reduced pasture fouling, reduction in the need for wormers due to improved bovine gut health and a bonus boost in soil quality. I’ve heard of a vet in Lancashire who is a confessed dung beetle champion – ‘but we must engage more vets in this conversation,’ Darren insisted. ‘Medication and wormers are so persistent in the soil that they impact the cattle as well as the dung beetles.’ Reducing the quantity of wormers in the herd is not only better for farming’s carbon footprint, but it’s also a real money-saver. ‘Many vets still habitually use a blanket approach, medicating the entire herd preventatively instead of identifying individual cows and treating them separately.’ This ‘just in case’ method is dangerous, never mind bloody expensive. We don’t take paracetamol just in case we might get a headache.
Darren is currently working with veterinary groups to demonstrate pasture-wide remedies – natural, herbal solutions to pests that really do work. Chicory is a natural player in a healthy pasture but is also an effective wormer for grazing cattle. Chicory’s high tannins also work to reduce methane production in a cow’s stomach. Handy. Darren described how ‘mob-grazing techniques’ move the animals around to allow pasture to rest and give dung beetles time to decompose the original dung. ‘We must view it as a functioning system and interconnect our decision-making with what we think is best for the land at the time.’
Ah, The System. Always acknowledged with such reverence among conservationists as if we truly know what it means. One dictionary definition of a ‘system’ calls it ‘an assemblage or combination of things or parts forming a complex or unitary whole’ and then cites a railroad as an example. We need to view our agricultural landscape like a superorganism made up of many parts. It may help if you visualise it as an engine. That’s fine. However you think about systems, dung removal, livestock carcass removal, beetle decline, diminishing soil fertility and cattle diarrhoea are all symptoms of system failure. With the current so-called ‘system’, essential nutrients will cease to stick around. And as well as putting cows in sheds and removing dung from fields, the broader disintegration of our landscape is catalysing wider regressions across dung beetle numbers as some grim domino topple. Once dung beetles disappear from an area, it’s hard for them to return. Our engine’s warning light is blinking furiously, but it’s just another light in a world of lights. We’ve become accustomed to it, and because we kid ourselves that we’re still moving forward, we convince ourselves we’ll be OK. We couldn’t be more lost.
I mentioned earlier about beetles’ double-wing situation. Darren’s wife Ceri studies how far dung beetles can fly. Scientists haven’t the foggiest about the distances dung beetles can tolerate between pats. Still, Ceri’s work will fill vital gaps in our information, directly informing how we manage our landscape connectivity. Thinking back to Knepp, it appears its complex habitat embroidery makes it much easier for a beetle to move about. And roaming livestock seems to be a critical stitch in the final design – the frequent dumps of Knepp’s cows, pigs and deer are literal stepping stones for dung beetles in that area of Sussex.
But connectivity will take time. Because although Knepp is the best habitat these species have had for centuries, the land surrounding the estate is a combination of intensive agriculture, habitat fragmentation and newly proposed housing developments. ‘Yes, Knepp is suitable, but it’s an island,’ Darren paused. ‘And if there is nowhere for the beetles to come from, if they can’t physically get to Knepp, then their recolonisation around the county is going to be maddeningly slow.’
Indulge me with one final peek into the future of farming, particularly in southern England. Some dung beetles are doing well due to the enormous increase in deer populations during the past 40 years. You may challenge the notion that there is a lack of mammals roaming across our pastures when some wild deer herds are expanding annually by 30 per cent, but it’s that dung assortment issue again. We need a selection box of dung to yank its associated beetles away from extinction, yet if temperatures rise as predicted, the chances of that happening are slim.
Recent research at the University of Exeter warned farmers to brace for an all-systems-change before 2100: a world that might be a whopping 5ºC warmer and 140 millimetres less rainy each year. This world will make the south of England inhospitable for livestock. Arable crops will replace pasture. Livestock will shift north. Parts of the south-east might suffer from drought so acutely that farmers will have to abandon land – a situation that is already challenging areas of Spain and the south of France. Temperate becomes Mediterranean – poof! Just like that.
More investigation is needed to establish the threat level here accurately, but what of our dung beetles? I posed this question to Mary-Emma. ‘Insect ecology is a web. And it’s one of the most delicate webs in the natural world. There is just so, so much that we don’t know. But the problem is we’re finding it out as we go along.’ I wonder…is this apathy or disconnect?
Penny told me how the dung beetles at Knepp have acted like Berocca to the soil, curing it of its epic post-war, agro-chemical hangover. Key observations from the latest (2021) soil samples across Knepp have labelled ‘soil compaction’ and ‘nutrient deficiency’ as ‘absent’, with an average of 16 earthworms per cubic foot of soil. I fancy a framed cross-section of this happy scene on my bedroom wall.
It’s no secret that the more life living within the soil, the more carbon is being attended to. Yet, generally speaking, our relationship status with soil is terrible – a long and messy breakup. The rains of winter 2019/2020 introduced two different kinds of mud to the market near me in Devon. Type one is textbook: rich, dark, fertile, carbon-rich; mud with beetles ploughing it. But type two is creeping into the vernacular: rammed with silt, nutrients and chemicals; mud that is injured topsoil; claggy, runny and sticky. Dead.
In 2015, the Committee on Climate Change stated that since 1850, we’d lost 84 per cent of topsoil in the UK. It’s thinning by 2–3 centimetres per year. Figures from 2017 estimate that we lose 24 billion tonnes of the planet’s fertile soil annually. Even microplastics have found their way into the remaining topsoil.
Are we seriously going to gloss over the death of the seeds, roots and tiny life that allows us to have a tomorrow? Even for a human, that level of arrogance is pretty astounding: a joke that will never land. Soil health is both our saviour and our handicap, and dung is a panacea to rescue our soil from its terminal diagnosis. To flog the analogy, it’s the prescription we keep forgetting to fill, let alone repeat.
Hope is a fickle notion but must be welcomed with open arms, across our farmland especially. At times, ‘regenerative agriculture’ and ‘nature-friendly farming’ seem like contradictory expressions, veering towards propaganda. Yet these terms define the crucial, holistic steps needed to pull Britain’s landscape through rehab and help shape it as a more resilient participant. It’s time we issue a belated public apology to the countryside and finally make meaningful amends. Minimising the physical disturbance of the soil – for instance, rotating crop sowing and grazing – has the proven potential to iron out kinks of the past. If anything, being savvier about soil makes financial sense. A landmark study in 2021 from Cambridge University and the RSPB found that land accumulates more capital when left to nature than when given over to humans. But then food security, of course, is the next question. Sigh.
The proposed Environmental Land Management (ELMs)3 government fund is a subsidy scheme for land managers that incentivises a collaborative, solution-based approach, issuing financial rewards for good practice. My friend and colleague, Chris Jones, a beloved and unforgettable figure in farming (and beaver reintroduction), often tells me how regenerative agriculture ‘works its arse off’ when it comes to provisioning for wildlife and future-proofing the herd. He explains: ‘If you keep cattle away from the pasture that they’ve shat all over and rotate them around little paddocks allowing long rest periods in between – around 60 days – they won’t have the opportunity to pick up parasites because you break the parasite life cycle.’ After dung beetles have initiated decomposition, the birds that visit to feed on insects break apart the pat and expose it to UV light, which helps kill bacteria and viruses that the cow could otherwise ingest. ‘You get this completely virtuous cycle of life simply by managing the grazing animals. Worming then becomes a pointless expense.’
Since Chris ceased regular ploughing on his land, Woodland Valley Farm in Cornwall, the soil’s organic matter has nearly doubled over the past decade and increased in depth by 1 centimetre. Based on earlier figures from the Committee on Climate Change, that centimetre of depth would have taken nearly a century to establish had farming practices remained as intensive. ‘Farming was once an exercise in applied ecology, but it has become one of applied chemistry,’ Chris wrote to me. I felt his frustration.
But as Darren Mann explained with a sigh (a lot of sighing recently!), ‘it’s unwise for farmers to be vilified. They know the land like nobody else’. If livestock is left outside over winter, regenerative practices are a winner for dung beetle survival. ‘But everyone’s tired of conservationists telling the world that it’s screwed, aren’t they? So, conservationists need to show people what to do.’ Darren stressed the impact an individual can have if they buy locally and choose to buy their meat from someone that looked after the animal well. Amazingly, he and several others are working on getting accreditation for ‘dung-beetle-friendly food’ on consumer packaging. Of course, asking the average consumer to gloss over the word ‘dung’ on their packet of sirloin might be a sticking point, but it’s a challenge we must rise to. Because, as we now know, a healthy cow is a healthy pat, a happy beetle, a delighted soil, and back to a healthy cow. Satisfying, isn’t it?
If you’re a pet owner, you ought to know that wormers for our dogs and cats can accumulate in the environment, too. But veterinary surgeries are an ideal place for a spot of idle environmental health banter, are they not? We should talk more and be bolder about asking people who can change the things we can’t. In the spirit of imparting invertebrate wisdom, Darren is relentless. His public speaking gigs at beer festivals are often so memorable he’s been stopped in the street by people who have attended them.
Technology has revolutionised the accessibility of nature and insects especially. An app called iRecord allows you to photograph any plant or animal – beetle, bee, fly (ideally the ‘bum view’ apparently) – upload it, and then clever people ID it for you before making the data available to the public and for further research. ‘So many amazing discoveries have been made just because someone with a casual interest in beetles took a photo of it with their phone,’ Darren smiled.
Mary-Emma Hermand, a young woman on the cusp of a brilliant scientific career – ‘too many times I’ve held a beetle tray of different species, only to be told that these can’t be found any more. But as young people with a drive for change, we can be a bridge between generations to stop this from happening.’ Introducing the people with the knowledge to the people willing to act would spark quite the ensemble, no? After all we’ve put them through, it turns out that the beetles are calling us to arms. We’ve got work to do.
I’ve figured out why the concept of rewilding appeals to me so much: it’s driven by unrelenting nostalgia. Tragic, perhaps. With similar vigour as a Tamworth pig roughing up a field margin, I dig up the past at every available opportunity, often carefully replacing elements of the present with it – a skill I have perfected since I was 10 and my parents’ marriage ended. I’m learning that acceptance is a work in progress, but it’s a needless battle and is, honestly, very tiring. For somewhere like Knepp, the same attitude applies. It’s a place that allows us to see with our own eyes that an environment released from a rigid plan and trusted to build upon its beginning is better than before. ‘Stop planning – and start watching,’ someone once told me.
Gina and I had explored nearly 20 kilometres around the Southern Block on foot. Exhausted and smelling of dung and autumn, we emerged feeling scratched and uncivilised, yet looser. The clouds darkened, and beech leaves framing a pond glittered in a quickening wind that buffeted some mallards, making them look drunk. We plaited trails between free-roaming animal droppings on our way back to the car. Scanning crusts for six-legged pioneers, I decided that I would like to see dung beetles hopscotch pats on a more regular basis, please. Later, when writing this chapter, some late-night analogy had me likening their fate to sitting beside a loved one on their deathbed and hurriedly trying to comb through a lifetime of archives in their precious remaining hours.
I also considered that the world that turns below the soil would continue to abort our good sense if we were not careful. After all, it is already true elsewhere. Underwater habitats (freshwater in particular) hide a world about which we are equally ignorant – anyway, enough of these idle musings. Back at darkening Knepp, I needed to charge up the i3 and head home. Time to scrub up, look sharp and go see a river about a fish.
Notes
1 Yes, half-man half-bull in Greek mythology, but also an actual dung beetle and a certified bad arse. Relatively common in the UK, it enjoys sandy grassland and heathland. Look it up – it really is something else.
2 Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish naturalist who coined the binomial method by which plants and animals are classified, ranked and named across the natural world. The ‘Father of Taxonomy’. Bit of a legend, tbh.
3 Part of the 2020 Agricultural Act laid out by DEFRA aiming to emphasise environmental benefit. Among the farmers I know, it’s been warmly received.