Walking in England’s New Forest in 1892, butterfly collector S. G. Castle Russell encountered such numbers of the insects that they “were so thick that I could hardly see ahead”. On another occasion, he “captured a hundred purple hairstreaks” with two sweeps of his net.
Patrick Barkham, who recounts these riots of nature in his 2010 book on butterflies, laments never seeing such a sight. However, new research suggests Barkham is a rarity, because a lot of people are forgetting, or just don’t appreciate, how much wildlife there was.
To gauge this effect, Lizzie Jones at Royal Holloway, University of London, compared population records dating back to 1966 of 10 UK bird species against public perceptions of those birds. More than 900 people told her how abundant they thought the species – including declining ones such as house sparrows – were today and when they were aged 18.
Yeah the front grille of my car remembers.
Traveling from Montreal to Chicoutimi or to Sherbrooke, the car used to be covered in bugs.
Nowadays I don’t even have to take it for a wash. I get the odd bug on my windshield and that’s it
Probably due to overuse of pesticides.
I’ve always wondered about this anecdote, partly because I still see a lot of bugs when going out into the country. Is it that there are actually fewer bugs, or do the more aerodynamic cars of today cause fewer dead bugs to stick to bumpers/grills/windshields?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320474864_More_than_75_percent_decline_over_27_years_in_total_flying_insect_biomass_in_protected_areas (Please note: some scales are logarithmic and this is only for 27 years)
Is it that there are actually fewer bugs, or do the more aerodynamic cars of today cause fewer dead bugs to stick to bumpers/grills/windshields?
It’s actually the opposite - more aerodynamic means a smaller cushion of air, which should translate to hitting more bugs because they aren’t pushed out of the way as strongly or for as long. Instead, insect populations have fallen so dramatically that this effect still doesn’t make up for it.
I see this comment so much, but it was never true where I lived. In fact, I only ever experienced the insects covering my windshield thing for the first time less than a decade ago when driving through North Dakota, Montana… Big, open spaces, I guess. Where I grew up, there were trees and houses everywhere, no real open spaces. So maybe that made the difference.
I just drove through Montana again and had barely half a dozen insects on my windshield throughout the trip, so I do believe that’s a very obvious sign for people who live in that kind of area.
Anyway, what I miss is frogs. I used to see frogs and toads and even turtles all the time. Can hardly remember the last time I saw one.
middle east coast US in the 70’s and 80’s in the suburbs you would constantly have to clean your grille and windshield from bugs. If you left a window without a screen on it and a light on overnight it was some Temple of Doom shit
Same for where I lived in Southern Ontario. We used to need to really scrub the windshield every time we drove back into the city to get all the bugs off. Last time I drove, you could count every bug on your fingers.
There also used to be swarms of gulls at my parents’ cottage. Hundreds and hundreds of them every day. We used to bring a giant brush broom to clean all the bird shit off the granite at our swimming spot. Just 2 decades later (a decade ago) there were only dozens we’d see most days, and we only clean off the bird shit once/season.
As a child, there were hundreds of frogs there, too. I saw only a few at all on my last trip there.
Our ecosystems are struggling everywhere, at every level.
The outdoors used to be loud as fuck in summer with all the bugs and shit everywhere
I remember when I was a kid back in the 80s, walking to school one autumn day and seeing swallows in their 1000s lined up along the phone wires on one of the streets ready for their migration.
Sometimes I wonder if that was real.
I watched the straight line mission from Geowizard in the UK, and the forests are at a sad state. It’s all mono cultures with zero underwood. It just looks dead.
Sad boost for awareness.
