Advertisement

Ken Thompson: a cunning device to prevent the swallowing of insects

A bug viewer gives a clear view - once you've caught your bug - www.alamy.com
A bug viewer gives a clear view - once you've caught your bug - www.alamy.com

A gift-shop staple is the “bug viewer”, a clear plastic container with a magnifying lid, designed to allow you to examine an insect or other creepy crawly that you may have encountered in your garden. They’re usually packaged to attract children, but adults seem to have just as much fun with them. The instructions are typically very simple: “Capture your creepy crawly, snap on the magnifying lid and take a closer look”. 

But that does rather gloss over the most difficult part, rather like the apocryphal first line of the recipe for jugged hare: “First catch your hare”. In short, bug viewers are designed for viewing bugs, not for capturing them. The instrument for catching your bug, used by generations of entomologists but at the same time virtually unknown to the general public, is the pooter. It is unknown to my Word spellchecker too, which suggests “pouter”. 

Pooter - Credit: The Natural History Museum/Alamy 
A pooter, for the safe collection of insects Credit: The Natural History Museum/Alamy

To the more literary among you, “Pooter” will forever be the hero of George and Weedon Grossmith’s Victorian classic The Diary of a Nobody. This is one of the funniest and most enduringly influential of comic novels, and its hero Charles Pooter is clearly a direct ancestor of Adrian Mole. If you haven’t read it, then it’s time you did. 

Googling “pooter”, to my slight surprise, mostly turns up a hand-held device intended to produce authentic farting noises; YouTube is awash with examples of it in action. All good honest fun, but quite unrelated to the bug-catcher, which is “a bottle for collecting small insects and other invertebrates, having one tube through which they are sucked into the bottle and another, protected by muslin or gauze, which is sucked”. 

A female green dock beetle (Gastrophysa viridula) with abdomen swollen with eggs. Derbyshire, UK.  - Credit: Alex Hyde/Nature Picture Library
A female green dock beetle, abdomen swollen with eggs. Derbyshire, UK. Credit: Alex Hyde/Nature Picture Library

In other words, a device that allows you to suck an insect off a leaf and into a bottle, while avoiding any possibility of the insect ending up in your mouth. I say “any possibility” because pooters are moderately foolproof, but not completely so; bumblebee expert Dave Goulson describes a classic pooter accident in his book A Sting in the Tale. The name comes from the equally splendid name of its inventor, William Poos, an American entomologist who first described it in a paper in 1929. According to A Dictionary of Entomology, Poos used it to collect and study Cicadellidae, or leafhoppers to you and me. Given how hard leafhoppers are to catch, one can see why he needed a pooter. 

Poos’ original illustration looks like one you might use today, with the elegant addition (appropriately for the roaring Twenties) of a cigarette holder as a mouthpiece. It’s possible to make your own pooter, but much easier to buy one. Amazon will sell you one (and a bug viewer too), although I assume the reviewer who says “absolute game changer. This pooter is top notch and is going to really sort out all the problems I have going on in my life” is being mildly ironic. 

But the place for entomological supplies (including a whole range of pooters) is Watkins and Doncaster (watdon.co.uk), a family firm that has been supplying the needs of naturalists the world over for more than 140 years.

Thanks to Simon Leather for enlightening me about the  history of the pooter.