Richard ‘Bugman’ Jones
Richard ‘Bugman’ Jones is very good at finding insects, in fact he’s a professional. His boyhood interest in insects came from his father, Alfred Jones, an amateur botanist and general all-round naturalist. After a degree in biology (University of Sussex, 1979), Richard’s first jobs were in construction, antiquarian bookselling and medical publishing – very few bugs there! Entomology remained in the background, an interest bordering on passion, but always a hobby. Eventually, he started writing magazine articles on insects, and then began to work on environmental surveys. Publishing fizzled out, and insects took over. The picture is of him with a vacuum sampler, a two-stroke garden blower-vac, sucking up insects on the ‘living roofs’ of Canary Wharf – a project for English Nature. Here he was, in the shadow of London’s tallest buildings shortly after the 9/11 attacks, carrying something that looked like a rocket launcher. He was half expecting to be hailed by the armed-response anti-terrorist squad!