Bourne Comment

WHERE HAVE ALL OUR INSECTS GONE?

Another summer is fading, the smell of autumn is already in the air and soon the leaves will turn and fall as another year closes.

This has not been a good time for sitting in the garden because the weather has hardly been seasonal, cloudy and overcast most days, although there were one or two bright spells for us to enjoy being outdoors, but on those occasions we realised that one thing has been missing and that is the sight and sound of birds and insects that have always been a part of the rural scene.

Sadly, their presence has diminished with the years, especially for those gardens close to farmland where intensive agricultural methods have such a deleterious effect on wildlife. I can follow the farming year from my study window, an expanse of flat fen intensively cultivated annually with frequent visits from tractors pulling tanks of toxic fluid that is sprayed over the land killing everything except the growing crop.

Constant chemical application wreaks havoc with our flora and fauna while the land itself may soon protest at the constant round of annual crops coaxed into life with chemicals and there is a nagging and ever-present fear that it could well encourage the onset of a dust bowl scenario similar to that experienced in Oklahoma in the 1920s although if it does happen here there can be no excuse that we were not warned.

Meanwhile, the loss of our wildlife has been evident for decades yet the farming community continues to pursue profit without thought for conservation and although there are many landowners who are environmentally aware and take precautions to protect the habitats under their control, the overall picture is not good.

Anyone who keeps a weather eye open for birds and insects knows that their numbers have declined in recent years. The American naturalist and scientist Rachel Carson (1907-1964) published her best-selling book Silent Spring as long ago as 1962 in which she directed public concern to the problems caused by synthetic pesticides and their effect on the food chain, forecasting an earth slowly becoming unfit for life. There were those who scoffed at her predictions but they are unfortunately coming true. She was undaunted by the hostility of the chemical companies and caused a major shift in public awareness about our countryside by alerting the world to the hazards of pesticides and as a result, the American and global environmental movements were launched.

The increased use of pesticides and herbicides, particularly powerful selective weed killers, have turned land that was once meadow and field into highly efficient monocultures whilst miles of hedges that once surrounded them and provided safe havens for a wide variety of flora and fauna have been uprooted.

The dragonflies and grasshoppers that delighted my boyhood eighty years ago have gone, halcyon day when we played in fields covered with wild flowers, harebell, cowslip, bluebell, celandine, primrose and red campion, species that many people have never even see today. The buttercups were so prolific some years that our clothes turned yellow with the pollen. Boys and girls hunted for a lucky four-leaved clover and found them in abundance. They sat making daisy chains on summer evenings but even this once simple and commonplace flower is now hard to find. A galaxy of colour flitted by with passing butterflies, common blue, brimstone, hairstreak, orange tip, painted lady, small skipper and red admiral among them, and we wondered at their beauty while the sound of summer all around us was the hum of life from a multitude of insects that have now become rarities in the rural landscape.

It is now quite evident here in Britain that there are fewer birds around, even those of the more common species, and government statistics confirm that the overall breeding populations of individual species in the UK have declined significantly over the past forty years, a shortage that is particularly noticeable in our gardens even though we provide a regular food supply to attract their company.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs reported in October 2014 that among the factors responsible for the decline in farmland birds was the intensification of farming that took place over a long period, increased pesticide and fertiliser use and the removal of non-cropped features such as hedgerows, resulting in the loss of suitable nesting and feeding habitats and a reduction in available food.

There has been a dramatic drop in the number of sparrows and starlings in recent years while there are also fewer thrushes and blackbirds mainly as a result of the relentless progress of intensive agriculture that has reduced the number of insects on which they live.

No one who walks in the countryside or who puts out titbits for visiting birds can fail to have noticed this unfortunate decline and the situation is of particular significance in springtime because of the cuckoo, a migrant visitor to our shores from tropical Africa and southern Asia and a timely reminder that spring has arrived. Unfortunately, they too have become scarce with the passing years, partly because of the shootists lying in wait in Spain, Italy and France, and more importantly, the islands of the Mediterranean such as Malta, where they frequently land for a rest only to become the victims of the guns. Then when they do arrive here, the birds find that their traditional habitats have been further eroded by agro-chemicals and other effects of intensive farming and so the sound of the cuckoo is slowly becoming a memory or merely the stuff of poetry.

I have noted their distinctive cry as early as April 14th which is traditionally Cuckoo Day and thirty years ago when we moved to this house overlooking the fen on the outskirts of Bourne, their song filled the air from morning to night from April through to June, but this year as with last and even the year before that we have heard none and so man may well have claimed yet another victim.

Owls too hooted until late as we sat on the patio enjoying the warm weather on a balmy summer’s evening but recently there has been silence from out there in the fen. The list of missing birds grows with each passing year and this summer we have been down to a few starlings, blackbirds and sparrows with the occasional magpie dropping by for a morsel of Hovis crust. Wrens, robins, chaffinches, pied wagtails, siskins and goldfinches that once visited our garden have become a rarity, the two nesting boxes where many families of bluetits were raised in past years remain empty and even such hardy species as feral pigeons and collared doves are fewer in number.

The picture is much the same with insects with a noticeable absence of butterflies, ladybirds, earwigs, spiders and wasps, and even the humble worm has disappeared from the soil while bees now face another potent threat from neonicotinoid pesticides, a relatively new type of chemical used in the last twenty years to control a variety of pests, especially sap-feeding insects such as aphids on cereals and root-feeding grubs which, it is claimed, has led to a decline in the population of insect-eating birds.

If they are connected to current bee decline as suspected then this is a most serious development because bees are our very lifeline with nature where pollination is a necessary procedure to sustain our annual food production and so the use of neonicotinoids is of particular concern to beekeepers and has led to partial bans on their use for specific crops in several European countries, including France, Germany, Italy and Slovenia. As a result, an online petition to Parliament is currently underway to prohibit their use in this country although the government seems unwilling to impose any restriction on those used for oil seed rape crops and this is now being challenged in the High Court by the environmental charity Friends of the Earth.

The fight against the use of chemicals in the countryside therefore continues. Certainly, all of these once welcome visitors have been noticeably absent this year and contemplating the resulting barren wilderness of my once busy, buzzing garden from my chair on the patio, I am reminded of Rachel Carson’s warning that in our arrogant desire to win total control over nature, human safety is also at risk through the exposure to or the ingestion of chemicals used to treat the soils. We could well be next.

Note: This article was published by the Bourne web site on 28th August 2015