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Have you noticed there aren't many bugs around?
What fascinates me most about the disappearance of insects is how quietly it happened. There was no particular summer when we walked outside and announced that the bugs were gone. There was no funeral for the moths around the porch light. Nobody held a memorial service for the bugs that used to splatter against our windshields.
I used to run around our lawn on Chautauqua Lake growing up catching lightning bugs in mason jars. We had fly strips hanging from our kitchen ceiling. Running across the grass in summer was a good way to get stung by a bee. We'd go to bed at night with giant mosquito bites. And the crickets! A symphony every night.
In a German study, a 76% decline was noted in 27 years in flying insects in 63 protected nature areas. In midsummer--the height of insect season--the decline was 82%. This is the landmark 2017 study that really brought attention to the "windshield phenomenon"--a phenomenon in which people are noticing they don't need to clean their windshields off on long drives.
There isn't one explanation for the decline. Insects have been hit from almost every direction. Wild fields have become subdivisions and shopping centers. Hedgerows have disappeared. Farms have become larger and more intensively managed. Pesticides and herbicides have changed the landscapes where insects once flourished.
Then there are our immaculate lawns.
We mow acres of clover, dandelions and native plants and replace them with grass, which may look lovely but isn't particularly useful to much of anything. We spray mosquitoes, spray weeds, spray gardens and spray agricultural fields. At night, our towns, houses, parking lots and highways glow with artificial light, disrupting insects that evolved in a world that actually became dark when the sun went down.
Insects are near the bottom of an enormous food web. Birds eat them. Bats eat them. Frogs eat them. Fish eat them. They pollinate flowering plants and food crops. They break down dead plants and animals and return nutrients to the soil.
The numbers help explain their importance. A 2016 study estimated that insects contribute at least $57 billion annually to the U.S. economy through services such as pollination and natural pest control. Globally, about three-quarters of the world's food crops depend at least partly on pollinators, including bees, butterflies, moths, beetles and flies.
Even the insects we don't particularly like are doing something.
And lately I've been thinking about birds.
We talk frequently about declining bird populations, but a bird can't live on our appreciation of its song. It has to eat. Many birds depend heavily upon insects, particularly when they're feeding their young. A nest full of baby birds requires an astonishing number of caterpillars and other insects.
The numbers are sobering there, too. A 2019 study estimated that North America has lost nearly 3 billion breeding birds since 1970, representing a decline of almost 29 percent. The study found especially steep losses among grassland birds, shorebirds and aerial insectivores such as swallows and flycatchers.
Take away enough insects and eventually something farther up the chain has to notice.
Maybe us.
We simply adjusted to a new normal.
That's something human beings are remarkably good at doing.
Each generation accepts the natural world it inherits as more or less the way the world has always been. A child who sees five fireflies in the backyard may be delighted by five fireflies. She doesn't know that her grandmother remembers hundreds.
Perhaps that's why the windshield is such an interesting measuring device. It isn't scientific, certainly, but memory sometimes records changes that statistics arrive later to explain.
I never imagined I would feel nostalgic for scraping dead bugs off a windshield. I certainly never expected to miss June bugs banging against the screen door. But maybe we should pay more attention to the things that aren't there anymore.
We spent much of the last century figuring out increasingly sophisticated ways to kill insects, repel insects and remove the places where insects live.
Now we may be discovering something our grandparents probably understood instinctively.
A world full of bugs can be annoying.
A world without them could be terrifying.