As anyone who drove a car in the 1970s knows, insects could be a damned nuisance; on summer days, their splattered remains stuck to the radiator, bonnet, wing-mirrors and worst of all, the windscreen in their thousands. On long journeys, the windscreen became so smeared that it became necessary to stop somewhere along the route and give it a good scrub with a sponge and a bottle of water as windscreen wipers and the primitive washers just made thing worse.
Driving in the darkness of a sultry evening was just as bad as you could see the nocturnal insects heading towards you (or more accurately, you to them). Some would escape in the draught and live another day, but many would be killed and record their fate as a grey, splodge. On many occasions the sheer numbers of moths illuminated in the car’s headlights would make it appear as though one were driving through a snowstorm.
The analogy is a good one. If you never drove when insects were abundant, the next time you drive in a snow shower, imagine each flake is a moth. That is how numerous moths were.
As a boy in September, in Keyworth, the telegraph wires outside my house were, on many occasions, adorned with Swallows and House Martins. They were in their thousands for a few days and every now and then, a few hundred set off together for a flurry of flight, as though they were testing the waters to see if the time was right to set off for their ten-thousand mile journey to South Africa. Then, one day there would be none. Gone until April next year.
Swallows still return in April but in numbers that are a tiny fraction of what they were then.
These personal recollections are not fanciful, distorted memories; they are evidenced by scientific research and they don’t apply only to Nottinghamshire or even Britain. Research in Denmark shows that between 1997 and 2017 there was an 80% decline in the abundance of insects and the birds that prey upon them. In Kent, a ‘splatometer’ study of car registration plates found 50% fewer insect splats in 2019 than in 2004.
The science showed that this has nothing to do with the aerodynamics of modern cars. The decline in insect numbers is a fact. And the declines are massive and they should worry all of us because like them or not, our existence depends on them pollinating our crops.
I like them regardess of the services they provide. From the bumbling of the humblebees at the early-flowering Coltsfoot on a sunny, chilly day in March to the humming of the hoverflies at the Ivy blossom in October, with all the delights of the butterflies, damselflies, dragonflies, moths, grasshoppers, crickets, mayflies, caddisflies, beetles, bugs and ticks all the summer long, they summarise summer.
Lots of things are very wrong with the way in which we humans are abusing the environment that we depend upon. Overly-intensive agriculture, an obsession with tidiness, profligate applications of herbicides and insecticides, intensive burning of moorland, pollution of watercourses … the list goes on.
I was saddened and depressed by what was happening to the natural world when I was a teenager. I console myself now, in the knowledge that the Earth will be around long after humans become extinct, and like the mass extinctions that have gone before, evolution will create a planet anew, teeming with unimaginable species living in perfect ecological harmony.
I just hope to God (although I don’t have one) that an ‘intelligent’ species doesn’t develop in that new dawn.