Last year a really huge dragonfly flew in through a window in the car giving everyone inside a fright. I made a mental note that seeing an animal like that had become a rarity and this followed a winter when all my honey bees, those stoical workers in their seven hives, had perished.
The main thrust of an article by Anthony King (“The altered flight of the humble bee” Irish Times 2nd March 2017) was aimed at the neonicotinoid insecticides. His article made me remember DDT because it took far too long before the invidious effects of its widespread use as an insecticide became apparent. The poor birds of prey at the top of the food chain, which had fed on birds and rodents, which had fed on insects poisoned by DDT, trying to hatch eggs so soft that they would collapse. So perhaps it should be no surprise that another substance with zoocidal properties released into the environment in substantial amounts might be at the heart of the ongoing threat to the insect pollinators and to many other insects and arthropods, as well as to those animals that feed on them. It is, for example, now postulated that the massive decline in the once ubiquitous and cheeky house sparrow may have resulted from the lack of insects needed in the diet of the hatchlings during their first few days of life. Indeed so common and widespread were they that one of the collective terms to describe the group was the very word ‘ubiquity’.
When I was a child growing-up in the fifties I remember how, at our family home in County Leitrim, crickets and grasshoppers, many varieties of butterflies and moths, dragonflies, earwigs and pissmires (both the walking and flying varieties) were all commonplace. The sometimes sultry summers were punctuated by much bird and insect noise and the buzz of a humble bumble bee searching to escape through a window or tangled in a spider’s web was a signature sound of a sunny day. The same countryside nowadays seems so sterile and the rivers, once so full of fish, also much diminished in life.
Something really rotten is going on. Perhaps it really is too late for many species but repeated comprehensive audits of the insect world would seem to be a useful prognostic tool for measuring the future health of both the environment and ourselves, just as a miner’s canary warns of impending asphyxia or an explosion. The global threats to large land mammals are much easier to transmit to the public than threats to the relatively inconspicuous insect world but the destruction of the latter may have much more serious consequences for us all. We are the inheritors of the Garden of Eden and even though the mortal taste of its forbidden fruit is supposed to have opened our eyes to the knowledge of good and evil our eyes seem almost totally blinkered to the ongoing and almost wilful desecration of that inheritance.
There are other threats of course but it is perhaps corporate and individual greed that ultimately are changing not only the environment but also rural society so much. Just a half a century ago milk would have cream on the top of it in the morning and usually came from hand-milked cows, which had come in from flowery pastures and which was distributed through small farmer-owned cooperatives, where neighbours met each day. Now there is a move towards zero-grazing of cows, which seldom leave their sheds, fed from monoculture prairies, milked automatically and distributed centrally, even internationally, and onto the supermarket shelves as a watered-down and homogenised product in plastic containers. “Every little counts”. Really? Every little insect does however count.
I would love to be able to wander through wild flower meadows down to the lake’s edge, once again, in the certain knowledge of catching some perch or a pike for supper. Watching rabbits hopping into their burrows and rising snipe, curlew and lapwing on the way there. To watch cranes and coots and moorhens busy themselves at the mouth of the river, while my float, made from a cork from a bottle of Guinness and a match stick, bobbed up and down on the rippling waters of Dunaweel Lough. But, alas, all I have now are these little pearls of distant memories. I ponder can suchlike ever return, just as I mourn the almost complete loss of the jarring corncrake’s call, the twit-twooing of barn owls flying, like white-faced ghosts, past a window and even the terror caused by a bat circling round my candlelit bedroom not unlike what that dragonfly did, in the daytime, last summer as I was driving leisurely through the lakelands of Ireland.
