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Starvard University · Insects with Fabre
Fabre turns the bugs in your garden into the strangest, most wonderful characters you have ever met. Come watch beetles, cicadas, mantises, and crickets with the greatest insect watcher who ever lived.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
An old French schoolteacher spent his life on his knees in the grass, watching bugs. He watched a beetle roll a ball of dung like a tiny athlete, listened to cicadas sing all summer, and wrote it all down so beautifully that people call him the Homer of insects. His secret was simple: he watched, patiently, and he wrote down what he truly saw.
Jean-Henri Fabre (1823 to 1915) was a poor French schoolteacher who taught himself science and spent fifty years studying the insects of Provence. His ten volumes of Souvenirs entomologiques, partly retold in English by his translator Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, read like adventure stories whose heroes have six legs. The two books behind this course are The Life of the Grasshopper, which also covers the cicada, the mantis, and the crickets, and The Sacred Beetle, and Others, about the dung beetles.
You need no laboratory for this course. Fabre did his best work in a scrap of waste ground beside his house, with a magnifying glass, jars, patience, and a notebook. By the end you will know his most famous insects, you will have simple experiments to try in your own backyard, and you will be keeping an insect journal of your own. One honest warning travels with us: Fabre argued with Darwin all his life, and some of his explanations have been corrected since. His watching, though, has never been beaten.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The eight lessons
Lesson 1
Jean-Henri Fabre was born in 1823 in Saint-Léons, a small village in the south of France, into a family that was often poor and sometimes hungry. As a small boy he was sent to live with his grandparents in the country, and there the natural world got hold of him for good. He came home full of questions about beetles, birds, and plants that nobody around him could answer. School was irregular, books were scarce, and much of his education he simply gave himself, reading whatever he could borrow and learning Latin and mathematics largely on his own.
His road into science ran through the classroom. He qualified as a schoolteacher while still in his teens and spent years teaching in village schools for very little pay, then taught at Ajaccio in Corsica and later at Avignon. All the while he studied in every spare hour, earned degrees by examination, collected plants and insects, and began publishing observations. Teaching fed his family, barely, but watching living creatures was his real work, and the two callings fought over his time and his tiny salary for decades.
In 1879, at fifty six, he bought a modest house with a piece of rough, stony, weed grown ground at Sérignan in Provence. He called the place the Harmas, and it became his outdoor laboratory for the rest of his life. There, among the thyme and the beetles, he wrote the ten volumes of his Souvenirs entomologiques, the insect memoirs that made him famous across Europe. He died in 1915, aged ninety one. Admirers named him the Homer of insects, because he sang the deeds of his small heroes the way Homer sang the heroes of Troy.
Fame came slowly and mostly at the end. For most of his life Fabre was a provincial schoolteacher publishing essays that few noticed, supporting a large family on a small income, and buying his jars, nets, and books out of his own pocket. Only in his last years did visitors begin making the journey to Sérignan to meet the old man among his cages and flowerpots, and only after his death did translations, including the two English volumes behind this course, carry his insects around the world. The lesson in his biography is the same as the lesson in his books: patient work, done faithfully for its own sake, outlasts neglect.
Lesson 2
Fabre opens The Sacred Beetle, and Others with a spring morning walk. He and a few of his pupils, lads he calls his friends and comrades as much as his students, set out to see whether the sacred beetle has appeared, whether the stickleback in the stream has put on its bright wedding colors, and what the swallows are doing. That walk is his whole method in miniature. Go out to the living creature in its own place. Go with questions, not conclusions. Look long enough for the animal to forget you are there and get on with its life.
His second rule was to test what he saw. Watching told him what an insect did; simple experiments told him why, or at least what it could and could not do. He moved a beetle ball, blocked a path, offered different foods, and changed one thing at a time, then wrote down the result whether it flattered his idea or not. You can copy this with almost nothing: a magnifying glass, a notebook, a glass jar for a few minutes of close looking, and the discipline to sit still longer than feels reasonable.
Now the honest part, and it matters. Fabre rejected Darwin theory of evolution, and argued against it all his life. He believed each insect instinct was a finished gift, given whole, and could not have been built up gradually. On that great question, science has not followed him: modern entomology accepts evolution and has corrected a number of his conclusions, including some of his claims about what instincts can and cannot change. Read him, then, the way he taught us to read insects. Trust his eyes completely, because his observation was unmatched, and weigh his explanations the way you would anyone else.
Lesson 3
On the sheep grazed plateaus of Provence, spring brings out a glossy black beetle about an inch long, and Fabre walks out with his pupils to find him "rolling that pellet of dung in which ancient Egypt beheld an image of the world." The Egyptians carved this beetle, the scarab, on their temples and seals, and no wonder. From a fresh heap of dung the beetle cuts and kneads a portion with his toothed forelegs and broad head, shaping it into a ball as round as he can make it, food for himself, gathered with the seriousness of a baker at his oven.
Then comes the performance that made him famous. The beetle turns around, plants his head down and his long hind legs up against the ball, and pushes it backwards across the ground, rolling it home to his burrow. The road is rough, the ball is heavy, and other beetles keep arriving to steal it, which leads to wrestling matches worthy of any stadium. Fabre watched balls roll into gullies and get hauled out again, watched thieves win and owners start over, and concluded that in beetle society, as in ours, a good ball is worth fighting for.
The ball he eats is only half the story. For her eggs, the mother beetle works underground, in a buried chamber, and models the dung into the shape of a little pear. In a small hollow at the narrow end she lays a single egg, then seals her work and leaves. The larva hatches inside its own pantry, eats the pear from within, repairs any cracks with its own plaster, and in time emerges as a new beetle. And the whole tribe does unpaid public work: as Fabre says of the dung beetles generally, their proud mission is to clear the ground, burying filth that would otherwise foul the pastures.
Lesson 4
Every schoolchild once learned the fable of the cicada and the ant: the lazy singer begs all winter from the hardworking ant and is turned away. Fabre begins his grasshopper book by dismantling it. "Fame is built up mainly of legend; in the animal world, as in the world of men, the story takes precedence of history." The real cicada, he shows, never begs, never eats grain, and is not even alive in winter. La Fontaine, who wrote the famous verses, lived in northern France where the true cicada does not sing, and had almost certainly never seen one.
The true life story is stranger than the fable. The female lays her eggs in the pith of a dry twig. The tiny larvae drop to the ground, burrow down, and spend years underground, Fabre reckoned about four, feeding quietly on root sap in the dark. Then one summer day the nymph climbs a trunk, fastens itself, and its back splits open. Out draws the winged cicada, pale and soft at first, which dries in the sun, darkens, and flies to the treetops, leaving its empty shell gripping the bark like a little brown ghost of itself.
Only the male sings, and his instrument is not in his throat. At the base of his abdomen sit a pair of ribbed membranes, his cymbals, which muscles snap in and out thousands of times, with the hollow abdomen working as a sounding box. Whole hillsides of males together make the shimmering roar of a Provence summer. Fabre even tested the cicada hearing in his own blunt way, arranging for mortars to be fired near a singing tree during a village festival. The song never faltered. He was too honest to declare the insect deaf on that evidence, and said so, which is exactly how a naturalist should behave.
Lesson 5
On the sun scorched grass of Provence sits a pale green insect with her forelegs folded meekly together, and country people call her the Prègo-Diéu, the creature that prays to God. Fabre warns us at once not to be fooled. "Those sanctimonious airs are a mask for Satanic habits; those arms folded in prayer are cut-throat weapons." The folded arms are a sprung trap. Each foreleg folds shut like a pocketknife, lined with two rows of sharp spines, and it shoots out faster than the eye can follow to seize any fly, bee, or grasshopper that wanders within range.
The mantis is an ambush hunter, and nearly everything about her serves the ambush. Her green or brown dress matches her bush. She sits for hours, swaying almost imperceptibly like a leaf in a breeze. Alone among insects, she can turn her head, and she watches you with big eyes over a small pointed face, giving her an eerily thoughtful expression that Fabre loved. Then the trap fires, the spines close, and the prey is eaten alive, neatly and without hurry. She is, in his phrase, the tigress of the peaceable insect tribes, a hunter in a family of plant eaters.
Her family life is as dramatic as her hunting. The female is much larger than the male, and Fabre, watching pairs he kept, recorded that the suitor approaches with extreme caution, and not always with success, for the female sometimes seizes and eats him. Her motherhood is safer at a distance: she lays her eggs inside a frothy case glued to a stone or twig, which hardens into a dry, ridged pod. Inside, the eggs rest in rows through the winter, and in summer the case splits and scores of tiny mantises pour out and scatter, each one already folding its little arms like its mother.
Lesson 6
The book Fabre called The Life of the Grasshopper is really a whole orchestra of singing insects, and its first lesson is that grasshoppers and crickets make their music in completely different ways. The grasshopper and the locust sing with leg and wing: the inside of the great hind thigh carries a fine file of tiny pegs, and the insect draws it across a raised vein of the wing, like a bow across a fiddle string. The sound is a dry, cheerful buzzing, the noise of hot grass at noon, and the singer ears sit oddly, in a crescent shaped hollow on the side of his abdomen.
The cricket and his long horned cousins, the green grasshopper and the white faced decticus that Fabre studied for chapters, sing with wing against wing. One wing carries the file, the other the scraper, and a clear membrane on the wing works like the sounding board of an instrument, which is why so small a creature can fill a garden. The cricket ears are stranger still, placed on his front legs, so that he quite literally hears with his shins. Put a grasshopper and a cricket side by side and you can tell them apart by their antennae alone: short horns on the grasshopper, long whips on the cricket.
Their lives differ as much as their instruments. The field cricket is a householder. He digs a burrow in a sunny bank, with a little terrace at the door, and there he sings through the spring evenings, retiring prudently inside at a footstep. The green grasshopper is a night singer of the bushes, loud after dark. And the locusts, grasshoppers with a talent for crowds, taught Fabre respect and caution: in swarm years their marching young can strip a countryside, which is why he studied their eggs and their final moult so carefully, watching the winged adult draw itself, crumpled and soft, out of its last skin.
Lesson 7
Fabre experiments were not grand. He worked with flowerpots, bell glasses, bits of netting, and above all with interruptions: what happens if the ball is moved, if the path is blocked, if the prey is changed, if the insect is offered a choice? You can run honest experiments of the same kind this week. Pick one question you can actually test. Do the ants at a crack in the path prefer crumb or seed? Offer both, side by side, count the visitors for ten minutes, then swap the positions and count again, so the place itself cannot cheat you.
A few rules keep a backyard experiment honest. Change one thing at a time. Repeat the test on another day, because insects, like people, have moods and weather. Write down what happened, including the failures, before you tidy the story up in your head. And expect surprises: Fabre finest results often came when an insect flatly refused to do what the books said it should, like the cicadas who sang straight through his festival mortars. The refusal is data too, and sometimes it is the best data you will get all summer.
One honest difference separates your backyard from Fabre, and it is worth a sentence. Some of his experiments, confining insects for long stretches, staging encounters, letting a mantis courtship run its fatal course, followed the rougher habits of his century and would not pass the habits of care we expect now. Keep yours kind. Watch wild creatures briefly, house them only for minutes with air, shade, and moisture, never stage fights or starve anything for curiosity, and always put every creature back exactly where you found it, under its own stone, in its own hedge.
Lesson 8
Everything Fabre published began as notes. The famous books are his field notebooks, expanded and polished over decades, and the simplest way to become a naturalist is to copy the habit, not the genius. Your journal needs only a few things per entry: the date, the place, the weather, what the insect was doing when you found it, and what it did next. Add a sketch, however rough. Drawing forces the eye to count legs, wings, and segments in a way that glancing never does, and Fabre, who drew beautifully, trusted the pencil as much as the pen.
Keep the journal in one place and let it grow teeth. Return to the same hedge, wall, or garden bed across the season and record who arrives, who vanishes, and who changes: the first cricket song and the last, the week the mantis egg case hatches, the day the dung beetles appear on the path. Single sightings are gossip; a season of dated entries is knowledge. Leave a space in each entry for questions you could not answer, and mark the ones you later solve. Fabre questions sometimes waited years for their answers, and the waiting was part of the pleasure.
Close the course where Fabre leaves us: with respect, and with clear eyes. He rejected evolution and argued for fixed instincts, and modern entomology has corrected some of what he concluded, as Lesson 2 said plainly. What no later science has corrected is the watching itself, the dates, the behaviors, the small facts gathered one patient hour at a time. That is the inheritance your journal joins. Years from now, your notebook may be the only record of what lived in your garden this summer. Write it like it matters, because to the next naturalist, it will.
Sources
This course is taught from two books by Jean-Henri Fabre, in the classic English translations by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. Both are free for anyone to read in full at Project Gutenberg.
Graduation
You knelt in the grass with an old schoolteacher and watched a beetle roll its ball, a cicada climb out of the earth to sing, and a mantis fold her terrible arms. You know how to observe, how to test a question kindly, and how to keep a journal. The insects around your home will never look ordinary again. Congratulations, naturalist.
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