Spare a thought for the unloved ugly bug

The dragonfly - a common darter - came upon me sitting beside the garden pond, hands cupped over the top of a crowbar, and perched companionably upon my knuckles, a fellow basker in the autumn sun.

We gazed at each other at a few inches' distance (my spiky eyebrows scribbled a thousand-fold in the polished facets of its eyes). I admired its ruddy fuselage, the tracery of veins in its cellophane wings, the neatly-turned ankles that take up the bounce of landing. I was pleased, in a St Francis sort of way, that I had taken its feathery touch so fraternally and had not flinched away.

Later, back at work with the crowbar, I turned up a rock that I wanted to move and found it was a refuge for a whole group of insect carnivores: a couple of violet ground beetles, a centipede, and that much-maligned rove beetle, the devil's coach-horse. I let them all scuttle off and put my boot down carefully, where it would not crush them.

In our early years in the cottage, before we got round to filling all the holes in the walls, we learned to wear slippers on night visits to the loo, where any or all of these predators might be out on the hunt for woodlice. The dearga dhaoil, in particular, cocking its tail like a scorpion, seemed well worth walking around, even though its threat, like the earwig's, has little substance.

There is something about a jet-black insect that stirs a primitive aversion in human beings: beside the dearga dhaoil, the tinsel sheen of the violet ground beetle is somehow reassuring. If ladybirds were sooty little blobs, would children want to play with them? It is ridiculous that such aesthetic niceties, with roots, presumably, deep in our cave-dwelling past, should still govern relations with harmless fellow-species. This said, I entirely understand the irrational potency of phobia. Of all the reference works on my bookshelf, the one I have to brace myself to take down is the field-guide to European spiders.

To regard a big, black one in the flesh needs a considerable effort of will. What infant encounter, what household vibes, planted this abhorrence in my psyche? To recognise a phobia as pathological is an advance, at least, on the early modern attitudes that rated all animals and insects by their aesthetic appeal. The reader who recently begged me for suggestions on how to banish frogs from her garden would have found her loathing widely echoed in the 16th and 17th centuries, when frogs, like snakes and most insects, were seen as foul and filthy creatures (St Patrick's ecological cleansing was part of all this).

Nothing has so challenged the residual prejudices of humans and the persecution of species they find ugly or ungainly as the new concern for biodiversity (something given vital meaning, it must be said, by the epic revelations of the BBC's Natural History Unit). Most of the reasons advanced for the conservation of species are still entirely people-centred, but the notion of an intrinsic value in other species, quite unrelated to human welfare, is beginning to seem not unreasonable.

While we wait for the long-delayed national biodiversity report and action plans from Minister SilΘ de Valera's heritage department, a new publication from the Environmental Protection Agency offers the best available review of Ireland's habitats and species. Biodiversity in Ireland is an extended version of the fine chapter on the natural heritage, written by John Lucey and Yvonne Doris, that appeared in the EPA's Millennium Report.

Browsing through its many rich photographs, I found myself wondering how far the celebrated Co Kerry slug would command public interest if, instead of its attractively spotted skin, it were simply faeces-coloured, like other species of its family. And while the scarce and highly-endangered autumn crocus is well worth saving from a bypass proposed beside the River Nore in Co Kilkenny, its amethyst beauty and saffron stamens, plus its pharmaceutical potential, clearly add glamour to its cause.

Many of the plant and animal species under threat of extinction in this island are, by any popular standard, insignificant if not virtually invisible, and certainly unknown to the mass of its human inhabitants. Our "lower" plants, such as liverworts, stoneworts and mosses, are still producing species new to the Irish record, and the 3,500 or so fungi we know about are probably less than half the true figure.

Biodiversity in Ireland fills out the story of many species that made a brief appearance in the original chapter (such as those tiny but controversial land snails, the Vertiginidae) and expands on the picture of current research into birds and cetaceans. That Ireland's 16,000-odd insect species are represented only by half-a-dozen vulnerable butterflies underlines the booklet's call for a national Biological Records Centre - the indispensable central database, without which we are left to guess at what is happening to the good, the bad and the ugly among Ireland's wild tribes.

One of Ireland's most spectacular wild habitats, the Burren in Co Clare, is at last getting the kind of guidebook that opens its deeply strange world of stone to the ordinary lay visitor. A few months after David Drew's Burren Karst comes Mike Simms' Exploring the Limestone Landscapes of the Burren and the Gort Lowlands.

Both authors are enthusiastic research geologists (Drew at Trinity, Simms at the Ulster Museum) drawn again and again to the bizarre landforms and perplexing plumbing of the region. Simms, who has explored it for 15 years, directs his excursions to a more popular audience of walkers and cyclists and would-be cavers. Understanding a karst landscape above and below ground needs some tolerance for weird words and unfamiliar principles, but this booklet, with its graphics and photographs, makes it as simple as anyone is likely to get.

Exploring the Limestone Landscapes of the Burren and the Gort Lowlands is available from Mike Simms for €8.95 (IR£7.99 or £5.99 stg) at Eden House, 48 Purdysburn Hill, Ballycowan, Belfast BT 8 8JY.

Biodiversity in Ireland is available for €10 (£7.87) from the EPA Publications Office, St Martin's House, Waterloo Road, Dublin 4.