Andy Brookes BSc Hons Biol
I didn't really have any peers influencing me to be interested in natural history, I just liked wildlife and used to read the Observer books, one of which had a review of wild animals in the U.K including water voles.
Near to where I grew up in Newton Aycliffe, Darlington, Co Durham there were areas of land adjacent to an old railway line that was allowed to exist in a natural state. Ponds had colonies of both the common newt & also the great crested varieties. I used to stand and watch these creatures and sorry to say disturb them & handle them. At the time I had no idea how uncommon, the common newt actually was.
Then I obtained a microscope and looked at creatures such as Daphnia. i started work in a plastics factory on the outskirts of the town, and then progressed to work at ICI Billingham, however my love of nature drove me to study biology at Queen Elizabeth College(London University) Camden Hill Road, between Nottinghill & high St kensington. Andybrookestar (talk) 19:50, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
I ended up working in Environmental Health & Pest Control which lead to many years studying and investigating pests especially insect parasites.
Any picture which I have loaded up to Wikipedia I took the photograph & thus own the copy write. Since I have many years of study of Entomology and became a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society I thought it reasonable when it mentions state reference to simply put myself! Meaning that I thought the integrity of my knowledge & experience in describing or commenting on a particular insect should be on a wikipedia page to be acceptable. Just thought i would add that i (Andrew Brookes ) became a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society on the 4th of February 1987 and was a Fellow for over 10 years before I relinquished my Fellowship.
Unfortunately over enthusiast moderates have removed some of my material since they expect I should quote some written Ph.D. thesis somewhere. Lack of acknowledgement of someone’s expertise is adding to the inaccuracy of Wikipedia.
I loaded a very nice JPEG of a larder beetle and it was removed. If you have at look at the Larder Beetle page there is an extremely poor drawing type image ,which is said to represent a Larder Beetle. Having seen hundreds of Larder Beetles (Dermestes lardarius) in my time I can tell you that you would never be able to identify a real Larder Beetle from that image.
At least unless someone clones my identity none can meddle with the above written text, although i'm sure someone will prove me wrong