Too few of the little things

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, insects, invertebrates, conservation, rewilding, polemics

I have read that there are about 1/4 to 1/3 fewer insects on the Earth than there were half a century ago. For some insect groups, the remaining amount must be much lower. I remember driving cross-country in the 1960's, when we needed to wipe or clean the windshield of the car, and the grill, at the end of the day, and sometimes at midday also. That doesn't happen much anymore.

It's harder to collect butterflies than it was when I was a kid. I grew up in several places across the country. Whether in California, Utah, or Ohio, during the warmer months there were always several different kinds of butterflies in view. I just had to pick which one(s) I might like to add to my collection. 

Once, at age eleven, I picked up a praying mantis that was on a tree, where we were taking a walk in the forest. It was more than five inches long. It fought back a little—those spikes on the front legs can draw blood! But when it was warmed by my hand it settled down. I wondered if I could make a pet of it, so I tied kite string to it, just a bit loosely in the middle of the thorax where it wouldn't slip off. I tied the other end to my bedpost that night. In the middle of the night I awoke. Hearing a small noise I sat up, and nearly jumped out of my skin when the mantis flew right into my face. With wings and clawed "arms" outspread, it looked the size of a dinner plate! When I regained my composure, I untied it and let it out my window. Whew!

Children have a natural affinity for insects and small animals, if their parents and others don't drive it out of them. That affinity is the first emotion Vicki Hird draws upon in her book Rebugging the Planet: The Remarkable Things That Insects (and Other Invertebrates) Do – And Why We Need to Love Them More. While insects are the main "stars" of the book, the author expands the common term "bug" to include earthworms, garden snails, and other small, invertebrate animals.

Perhaps you know that most almonds are grown in California's central valley. Did you also know that keeping that almond crop pollinated every spring requires the services of most (some say 80-90%) of the honeybees in the U.S.? Millions of beehives and billions of bees are trucked to and from California every year. That by itself may have a lot to do with "colony collapse disorder", which leads to ever-increasing losses of honeybees across the country.

For several years I participated in the Great Sunflower Project, growing a certain species of sunflower each spring and counting how many native bees, and what kinds, would visit a particular plant during a daily 15- or 30-minute viewing session. Near the end of the season, when most of the flowers had ripening seeds, I had the added bonus of seeing goldfinches come for the seeds; I seldom see goldfinches otherwise. This endeavor is important because, if our honeybees fail, native bees must take up the slack! Fortunately, most sweat bees and mason bees and bumblebees are even more diligent pollinators than honeybees. There just aren't as many of them. One of the suggestions in Rebugging has to do with making homes for mason bees and other native bees, to increase their numbers in our gardens. In our case, we grow garlic chives, which has white flowers that draw bumble bees and at least 15-20 other species of bees (and hoverflies and certain wasps) for 2/3 of each summer.

Going through the book, one learns that pollination is not the only "service" provided by insects. Another has to do with rot. You may know that fungi work at breaking down fallen plant matter, from tree trunks to leaf litter. Fewer know that fungi are just one part of the "cleanup crew", which includes insects, slugs and snails, and earthworms. Some years ago I learned why, in pre-Colonial America, the natives ("Indians") were so famed for moving silently through the forest. There were no earthworms in North America before the 1600's, when some arrived in soil brought with plants from Europe. The forests before about 1650 were deep with leaf litter, which was only slowly decomposed by fungi and native snails and beetle grubs. Modern forests are almost litter-free because of European earthworms. The soil in my garden has one or two dozen per shovelful of dirt.

Another "service" is that insects in particular are "served up" to birds and mice and other small animals. A Little Brown Bat, for example, eats 1/4 to half its body weight in insects each night. Some portion of those will be mosquitos, though the bats prefer moths and "meatier" flies when they can get them. I've observed on farms that chickens will run down grasshoppers and crickets, which are big, fatty and calorie-rich.

Much of the book is advice about "rebugging" here, there and everywhere. So much so that it has a preachy tone that grows more and more intense. That's unfortunate, because nobody responds well to nagging. The last chapter or two are so exhortation-dense that I could hardly stand to read them. I remember reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, the quintessential environmental polemic. It was so very influential because it exposed the huge problems with pesticide use without adopting a nagging tone. Vicki Hird is tilting at the "windmill" of the big pesticide companies and Agribusiness. So was Rachel Carson. Ms Hird will have better success if someone with Carson's sensibility helps her produce a major rewrite of  Rebugging.