Rachel Carson, the Author of Silent Spring, once said:

“Most of us walk unseeing through the world, unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us.”

And in this day and age, it’s quite true. Aside from the ‘shifting baseline’ syndrome, where we may be aware of the difference in wildlife now as opposed to when we were a child, but cannot know what has gone before, many of us now walk around with heads down, glued to our mobile phones. How many people realise how quiet our countryside has become over the last 50 years, let alone 100 or 200?

Surveys by various groups have showed us some startling figures and all of them have been largely ignored, and is that because they don’t make for good reading. We are burying our collective heads in the sand. In the last 25 years, a common farmland bird, the yellowhammer, has declined by more than 50% and spotted flycatcher populations have declined by 93% since the 1970s. Populations of one of our much-loved heralds of spring, the cuckoo, have halved since 1995. There are several factors that have caused these declines, from habitat changes, climate change and more, but one major factor is the food available to them.

These birds, and many others, need insects to feed their young whilst they are in the nest. If the food isn’t there, the nests fail and the young die. Insects are vital for life on Earth and they are responsible for more than 75% of the food we eat. Since the 1930s, the UK has lost an incredible 97% of its wildflower meadows. These are habitats that are difficult to get back due their rich, natural biodiversity that has evolved over thousands of years. It’s hard to imagine how much insect life those meadows would have supported, which in turn would have supported a cacophony of songbirds and other wildlife including our much-loved hedgehogs.

The older generations among us will remember the insects splattered and stuck to the front of our windscreens during the summers of yesteryear. That doesn’t happen anymore and it’s nothing to do with cars being more streamlined. I used to work as a long-distance truck driver and trucks with their large square frontage are far from streamlined, and rarely did I have to clean my windscreen during the summer months.

Pesticides and lack of habitat means that insects are disappearing* and if we don't act soon, many other species will be in trouble, including those we rely on to pollinate our food crops. We need to start turning the tide of insect decline and start to work with nature and not against it. Suffolk Wildlife Trust, along with The Wildlife Trusts, has created the Action For Insects campaign, which asks people to make a pledge to take Action For Insects and do two things to help them. This could be something simple such as planting wildflowers in your garden, putting up a bee hotel, letting the grass grow in a corner of your garden or not using chemicals in your garden and buying local, wildlife-friendly or organic food, if you can. These simple acts can start to make a  big difference for wildlife and the first act can be signing up to make the pledge here Action For Insects

Hawk Honey
SWT Visitor Officer, Lackford Lakes
 

*For more information, please read Prof Dave Goulson’s Report, 'Insect declines and why they matter’