What a fantastic weekend we had in the company of our 3 scientists Dr Erica McAlister from the Natural History Museum in London, Liz Sweet- the Guernsey Scientist and our very own Dr Miranda Bane. The three film showings and talks from Erica took us into the wonderful lives of our local pollinators from the Furrow Bee, to the amazing world of flies.

 

It was a great privilege to premiere “Pollinators- Great and Small” made by Wild Islands a talented local film collective and to host Erica who has researched, filmed and documented flies all over the world. There is no doubt that our 3 hosts are serious scientists, Erica’s films may well appear in a BBC documentary this summer, Liz regularly studies and lectures on ocean marine life and Miranda is a surveyor and contributor to the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme, but apart from that none of us can be in any doubt that they like a laugh. And that spread to our audience and continued into the questions afterwards.

 

But what did we discover? Was it the life of the bee fly with its expanding proboscis? Or maybe the precarious life of the local Furrow Bee? The spinning drumstick like halteres of flies and the lumbering bloody nosed beetles all added to the picture. Whatever it was were all left in no doubt that we have wonderful nature in Guernsey, but the state of our nature is not wonderful. Declines in pollinator numbers effect all of our lives and there is much more to be done to protect the future of our planet and it’s peoples.

We loved the questions afterwards and we’re still working out which is Guernsey’s biggest pollinator. The emperor dragonfly? Great green bush cricket? Death’s head hawk moth? Or maybe the blackcap?