My father would sometimes say the least expected and most odd things. For example, if we were driving somewhere, enjoying a mild April Sunday on country backroads, he might say, “I hope I don’t hit a skunk.” Or, if it was cold and snowy, he’d say something about the skunks hibernating and there was little chance of hitting one.” It was an odd thing to say, unless you have hit one or more with your car over the years. He once hit two skunks at the same time, one under each front wheel. That takes talent, or perhaps bad luck. It leaves behind a vapor trail that keeps on giving.
Over dinner one evening not long ago, when the conversation and lapsed into uncomfortable silence, someone came to the rescue with an unusual question: “Did you notice you didn’t have as many bugs on your windshield this summer?” That was one of life’s greater mysteries I had not considered for a long time.
Back in the not always such good old days when we had a green two-toned Buick Roadmaster. It was the era when a young fellow would jog out to the pumps to fill the tank, check the oil and tires, and clean the windshield. There were always the dried out splotches of dead bugs, sometimes mixed with the calling card of a crow. My father could never avoid the temptation of pressing the button to shoot a sprtiz of window cleaning fluid and turning on the wipers to spread the bug juice around. By the time we got to the service station it was baked on.
The tank filled and the windshield clear, and we would head down the road again, only to be hit by another kamikaze bug or the calling card from an errant bird. For my father, it was an endless and futile crusade to have a clean windshield.
The dinner question remained to be answered. Did we have fewer bugs on the windshield this year than in the past? I gave a vague but safe answer, “Well, maybe….” That led to a discussion about the possible reasons. A fellow proposed that it was because our cars were more aerodynamic now than in the past. Another one suggested that it is because there is more traffic on the road and we often follow in the slipstream of a semi or another car, so the bugs fly off at an angle. “Does that mean we are transferring our problem to anyone on a bicycle?” someone asked. “That does not seem like a moral thing to do.”
I finally joined in, suggesting that perhaps bugs had evolved over the past century, and had learned to avoid heavy traffic. Bugs were getting smarter! That had to be the answer.
The rest of the dinner guests looked at me like my mind was slipping away with the fairies.
Almost immediately yet another person quickly said, “It’s because of what we’re doing to the environment. It’s global warming. We’re killing our insects!” And with that, we were soon on the receiving end of his monologue about how honeybees were dying off, there were fewer crested flycatchers and purple martins in the air, and even the bats were suffering.
It turns out that this question of bugs on windshields were not quite as wacky as I originally thought. Believe it or not, environmentalists have been counting and recording the number of ‘hits’ per windshield since the 1970s, and the numbers are decreasing. According to them, we are down by anywhere between ten and sixty percent, depending on the time of year or location. A group of experts from Denmark say it is even worse – between 80 and 97 per cent have been killed over the decades.
Even more alarming is a study that indicated that just 0.1 insects hit a license plate for every mile driven. Or one insect hits the license plate every ten miles. I have no idea how they measure that in Michigan where we do not believe in the expediency of front license plates. Nor does anyone know how many insects crashed into front license plates in the past. No one was counting.
My sister and her husband are amateur beekeepers, and they have noticed hive die-offs in a steadily increasing number from one year to the next. Part of it, their national association claims, is due to the global warming; part of it is due to the insecticides and other chemicals that are used on lawns, gardens, and farms.
The reason for this unseasonable column about insects and gardening in mid-December, is that before we know it, the seed catalogues will be coming to our homes. That’s good news for two reasons. First, we all have someone on our gift list who is impossible. If they garden, a gift certificate is an answer. There is still time to give them a gift card for Christmas, or next year. And second, if you garden or have space to plant anything, now is the time to think ahead toward next spring. Gifts like that are far better than some of the goofy ideas people have developed such as the clapper or the chia pet.
Gardening is better than mindlessly following an odd-ball idea from California where a group has been lobbying to ban black cars from the state. They have been riding this hobby horse since 2007. Black, they claim, absorbs heat and with so many millions of them on the road, they are a threat to life as we know it.
For a while this story circulated through the social media, but the state department of transportation says it is just rumor and myth. They have no plans, as of yet, to ban black cars.
Some bugs we probably would not really miss. Among them, mosquitoes, May flies, lantern bugs and stink bugs, as well as Asian beetles that look like ladybugs and infest our homes. Nor do we have a warm spot in our heart for bed bugs. But bees and butterflies? Yes, we would miss them. It is more than just the honey or pretty flying insects that we would miss. These are the pollinators, and our farms and orchards depend on them for survival.
Maybe you don’t care all that much about pouring a big dollop of honey on your food, but I am sure you would definitely miss apples, pears, and peaches. No bees, and there might not be any fruit. It’s as simple as that.
Beekeepers are spending more money each year to restock their hives. My sister, the Queen Bee of her local hive (club) told the members that a five pound box of bees would be just north of one hundred dollars in the coming year A few years ago it was about forty dollars.
A bug-apocalypse might be a very ugly dark cloud on our horizon, and that is a horrible prospect. Scientists are looking at all the possible ways to prevent it. Politicians, if they aren’t being bought off by Big Ag [riculture] are considering laws to prevent insecticide pollution. You and I have a hand in it as well.
As I just wrote, it will not be very long before the seed catalogues start arriving. Even the smallest garden has room for a few plants beloved by bees and butterflies. The other thing that a number of gardeners and environmentalists keep telling us is not to rake our lawns and ground cover down to the last leave, and not to get started too early in the spring. The insects need the yard and garden waste to keep from freezing to death.
It really is a number of small and simple things that add up. But what blocks us from doing it is that it is a very big world with environmental challenges far greater than the men and the women in it. We tend to think that if I do something but my neighbors do not, then is our work doing any good? Step that up to an international level, we wonder if it is worth the effort and expense to prevent air pollution when factories in China and elsewhere belch our coal smoke.
I understand that. As the late nature writer, Sam Campbell once said, “It is like using a squirt gun to put out a forest fire.”
But there is some good that comes out of doing what we know is right. Those who work on the maintaining and improving the environment are doing the right thing; they set the right type of example for others. It isn’t just the perky young things on Tik-Tok who are the influencers. We are all influencers in one way or another.
Far more importantly, there is, if nothing else, the quiet satisfaction of having done the right thing, even if it seems like a lost cause. We are part of the solution, rather than being part of the problem.