Small Game Hunter

I think that the name of Peter Smithers' Book Small Game Hunter is wrong. For Peter was not a hunter but an explorer. He has explored everything from his garden to the other side of the planet. He has explored not just the career as a scientist but as an artist, a communicator, a visionary, and in this case, an author, weaving his stories of his time playing with insects. As we journey through this book, we journey through Peter's life, starting with moth traps and curious mind. In the first half, Peter talks about his memorable encounters with beetles, flies and many other insects and arthropods. Not all of his findings and observations stayed in academic journals as he recounts the national excitement of finding a very rare spider – he was even interviewed by the Sunday Sport, a claim that I don’t think many entomologists can make. He talks of the hard work and skills involved when undertaking fieldwork, but also the joy of it, and I found myself nodding and smiling as I remembered my early student days undertaking similar, often chaotic, invertebrate surveys. Peter highlights the incredible amount of work that goes into creating atlases of species distributions – the entomological community in the UK is lucky to have so many individuals, mostly unpaid, who search this country for many an elusive species. And then in the second half, we move away from taxonomy and into the realm of outreach, I must admit I hadn’t realised what a diverse and often bizarre career Peter had had. He was an early advocate of encouraging entomophagy back into our western diets, and his enthusiasm comes through on the pages. His stories of events, shows and other outreach sessions are too filled with enthusiasm and hope. This is an excellent little biography of a man who studied little things, but there is nothing small about his knowledge or life.

- Erica McAlister, NHM