Invasive Aliens: Rabbits, rhododendrons, and the other animals and plants taking over the British Countryside

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Dan Eatherley. Invasive Aliens: Rabbits, rhododendrons, and the other animals and plants taking over the British Countryside

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Contents

Prologue. A Hornet’s Nest

1. Ecological Explosions

2. First Invaders

3. Romans and Normans

4. New Worlds, New Invaders

5. The Empire Strikes Back

6. The Plant Hunters

7. Unwanted Hitch-Hikers

8. Fur Farm

9. Freshwater Invaders

10. Underneath the Waves

11. Fighting Fire with Fire

12. The Future

Further Reading

Index of Species

General Index

Acknowledgements

About the Book

About the Author

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

To Georgia

Came into England all in one year.’

.....

As it turned out, the flight lines – four or five good ones – which were plotted on a map didn’t converge neatly at one spot, but the criss-crossing did hint at a patch on the outskirts of Tetbury. Sixteen inspectors congregated in a car park. Teams of two, each provided with a map, started walking a section of this patch. It was not long afterwards that Graham, and fellow inspector Gordon Bull, found the nest. The garden with the cypress trees was a mere 600 metres from where the first hornet was spotted 23 days before.

Photos of the hornet’s nest were emailed for confirmation to Dr Quentin Rome at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris – he has studied the Asian hornet’s advance with grim fascination for more than a decade. The nest was treated with a pesticide called Ficam B, an odourless white dust which is relatively harmless to humans but lethal to insects. Within an hour the nest was a mass grave.

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