It’s not often you can do something useful before breakfast.
But having taken my son and his friends to the airport at 4.00 a.m only to have their plane cancelled when we got there, I suddenly found myself with a couple of hours to spare that I wasn’t expecting, and I had an insect moment.
Forget Brexit, if you can, and read this. It’s also quite important. Maybe even share it.
I did two walks over the weekend, each of about forty minutes. One around home where I counted 26 different bird species, and one round a series of sugar beet fields north of Cambridge where I counted 3. Lots of crows, lots of pigeons and a single disorientated sparrow. There’s a number of reasons for the disparity, but the one we probably need to grasp is the decades of intensive, unforgiving, chemical farming that has led to the sterile, flatlands farming that brings you cheap sugar, but is hastening a silent Armageddon on your insects. The lack of birds is simply the canary in the mine for what is happening further down the food chain. The way it’s going, Cambridge, and not Petworth Park is the future.
Just by way of illustration, a major 27 year study in 63 different controlled and protected sites in Germany between 1989-2016 established that, during that period, more than 75% of the ‘flying insect biomass’ had disappeared. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809
Put another way, up to three quarters of the total weight of insects in the study areas had gone: moths, bees, ants, beetles, caddis flies, you name it. And when they go, all the useful stuff they do, like pollination, waste disposal, nutrient recycling etc, go with them. Your mysteriously clean car windscreen after a long journey isn’t an illusion or some mischievous bit of green propaganda, it’s a real thing, and it was only in my spending a year and a half writing a book about beekeeping that I became fully aware of it. Maybe you were onto it already, in which case my apologies. There’s loads of accessible science that you can read online if you’re interested, (try Friends of the Earth, or the Pollinator Action Plan, for starters), so no more statistics here.
The reason for the blog is not to make anyone feel bad, but to explain, on the contrary, how incredibly easy it is or individuals to do things to help reverse the trend if they choose to. The good news with insects that, unlike mammals and fish, they can bounce back almost as quickly as they disappeared, so every little incremental thing is immediately useful. Rachel Carson (Silent Spring) changed the way we thought about DDT back in 1962, so things can change. Here’s ten easy things:
Take non-organic pesticides out of your life and garden for ever. You don’t even want to know what glyphosate does to a bee’s insides.
Don’t obsess about weeding. Most weeds aren’t just not bad, they’re positively good.
Don’t mow anything in May. Just leave it and enjoy the huge increase in insect life it will bring.
Buy local, organic food and honey, if you can. Each time you do, it encourages more land to be set aside, and more people to run hives.
Leave some water around for insects, particularly bees. Just a little shallow bowl while it’s still dry out there.
Make or buy an ‘insect house’ and put it somewhere in your garden. You can find them in any garden centre for upwards of £10.00
Don’t cut down ivy. It has blossom that lives on deep into the winter after everything else has died back.
Stagger seasonal planting, so that not everything comes out at the same time.
Plant a wildlife garden, even if it’s just a window box. Get bee-friendly mix from Friends of the Earth.
Make sure supermarkets are aware of what you think. Repeatedly, because that’s the only way they listen.
Everyone wants to save elephants, rhinos and panda, which is understandable; they are highly visible, appealing, iconic and important animals. Unfortunately, insects don’t have the first three of those four attributes, which is why they have always tended to pass under the radar and their plight a harder sell. But, aggregated, they are hugely important.
This has been a public service broadcast, and I will now shut up.
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