Books | Pests in Houses Great and Small

Buildings provide safety from the outside world. We can escape the chilly cold, the ravaging rains. They are warm. They are cosy. Yet we are not alone in our houses. By creating unnatural structures we have inadvertently created new ecosystems for a myriad of animals. Some take advantage of the freely available food, from wood to flour, while others will hunt for their dinner. It’s a brave new world for animals.

Museums and historic houses are no different. There is plenty of food in the collections – paper, feathers, wood and much more. Storerooms can be warm, wet and dark: all perfect living conditions for lots of animals. We know what a disaster this can be for collections. Taxidermy mounts are suddenly naked. Labels holding all that data are destroyed. And even entire structures can become unstable.

Until a few decades ago, a terrifyingly huge range of chemicals were used to stop pests from eating or damaging collections. Because of their potential for human harm, we replaced toxic substances with better maintenance of buildings. We know some little critters like damp environments, so we work to create drier conditions that are also good environments for collections. There is a lot of guidance out there: websites, articles and books all giving advice to help reduce the risk of pests in your collections.

Perhaps arrogantly, I was a little dubious about a new English Heritage guide on pest management: Pests in Houses Great and Small, by David Pinniger and Dee Lauder. Another pest management publication? Do we need it? I have been on the courses and read the guidance. I carry out pest management checks regularly in my stores. But I was surprised, and pleased, to say I liked it.

Although written for English Heritage and its historic houses, this book can be used by museums with ease. There is a lot of crossover: collections, old buildings with poor conditions, lack of funding to improve stores and a decline in the number of expert staff to care properly for collections.
 
What makes English Heritage sites and museums so important are the collections. This is sometimes overlooked in the recent commercial push for many institutions as a way of generating income. Without the collections there is no museum.

The book is nicely laid out, with good-quality images throughout and clear language from start to finish. Pinniger and Lauder cover the infamous culprits, such as the carpet beetle (or wonderfully named woolly bears), the deathwatch beetle and the paper-eating silverfish. There are many more, too.

Fortunately, this book is split into sections so we are not confronted with a big list of species. The damp-loving pests (pesky silverfish, ghostly booklice, long-nosed weevils) are all under the same section. Frisky flies are discussed together and wood-boring insects are under one roof. At the end of each section there’s useful best-practice guidance on how to minimise risk from these pests.

Short case studies are dotted throughout, providing real-life examples of pest damage and what staff did. For some readers these case studies may be like gratuitous images of ravaged collections, but these examples show the enormous destruction that tiny animals can cause and, importantly, the simple things we can do to prevent it.

I have a feeling this book will prove invaluable to small regional and independent museums. I have worked with several small museums over the years and I know the funding to care for their collections is alarmingly low.

This book has enormous potential to give staff the confidence to identify different pests and take precautions to safeguard their collections. It’s all about survival. The same is true for collections as it is for rabbits: don’t get eaten.