Life of a Chalkstream: The reason why your windscreen has no dead insects

Greetings!

I think we all ask from time to time the question, where have all the insects gone. Clouds of moths gathering around a light at night. Flocks of butterflies festooning the springy turf on a downland walk. That anglers favourite, the blue winged olive, the reliable companion to a day on the river. Today all are absent or around in much reduced numbers. The empirical manifestation of this decline is the lack of corpses spattered on a car windscreen and headlights after any drive in the country.

Modern pesticides (there is a clue in the name) which are slavered over farmland, plus the increasing use of flea treatments for pets and all manners of household chemicals play a part but a survey just published that charts the disappearance of meadows from the British landscape adds another twist to this sorry tale of rural destruction.

A grim outlook

Thanks to the digitisation of maps from the 1960’s which have been layered on to current maps and maps from the 1930’s by the UK Centre of Ecology and Hydrology we can now put numbers to what has happened to our grasslands, wetlands, heathlands and other habitats, along with urban development and farming over the past 90 years. With the exception of woodlands it does not make for happy reading.

Grasslands have shrunk by 29%. Semi-natural habitats including heathland and wetland by 42%. Urban areas that went from 13% in 1930 to just 14% in 1960 then jumped to 20% in 2020. Counterintuitively, in the same period, the woodland area has doubled from 6% to 12%. The one flaw in the digitised map data is that it is unable to differentiate agricultural grassland from wildflower-rich meadowland; other surveys suggest we have lost as much as 97% of wild meadows in this period.

Overall the period of greatest decline was from the 1930’s to the 1960’s which is something I know to be true of our part of Hampshire. I am sure plenty of you are familiar with the Roman road that connects the A303/A34 turnoff with Stockbridge. Today the fields that line the 5 mile route are a bellwether of modern agriculture with rape, wheat, barley, poppies, sunflowers or flax appearing in different years according to the changing demand. But wind the clock back to a point in time within the 90 years of the survey and you would have seen not crops but thousands of acres of grass chalk downland flecked with scrubby hawthorn bushes, lightly grazed by sheep but otherwise left to its own devices.

So, to come back to the question: if the rate of habitat decline has been slowing why have insect populations have fallen so precipitously this century. My guess is that some while ago we passed a tipping point. At first as the wildlife lost its native habitat it moved to other places but animals insects and birds have become marginalised from even these substitute homes as farming has become more efficient, urban spawl taken its toll and pollution rendered uninhabitable swathes of the countryside and thousands of miles of river. In the end our insects are dying out because they are running out of places to live.

Talking up a storm

Did you know it rained in winter? And I also heard a rumour that summer can be hot. Now, of course, to you and me that is no news but for the 24 hour news cycle, the Met Office and every retired weather forecaster in search of continued media exposure this is breaking news.

I despair when we are deluged with stories of upcoming weather ‘events’ or named storms which are essentially nothing more than the weft and weave of the British climate. From a purely selfish point of view it creates havoc for us in the office as the phones light up and the Inbox fills up. Eight times out of ten the predictions are woefully wide of the mark, with us all marched up the metrological hill Duke of York (not that one …) style.

Michael Fish a few hours before the Great Storm of 1987

In the bloodstock industry there is a saying ‘Breed from the best and hope for the best.’ I suspect in the weather industry there is a saying that goes something along the lines of ‘Talk up the storm and ignore the norm.’ The outcome of these headline filling forecasts is rarely as bad as predicted which I guess is a safety first approach borne out of the infamous Michael Fish it-is-a-storm-but-not-much-of-one forecasting error of the 1980’s.

You can see the forecasting, protect my back thought process: well, if we say it is going to be really bad and it is bad, kudos to us. And anyway, if it is not as bad as we say it was going to be how is that going to hurt anyone? Better safe than sorry! At this point high street retailers, anyone in the hospitality business and chalkstream letting agents run screaming for the hills whilst every government agency talking head dons a hi-vis jacket and hard hat to sharp elbow their way into the narrative.

Weather forecasters have a proper scientific title; they are meteorologists pursuing the branch of science concerned with the processes and phenomena of the atmosphere, especially as a means of forecasting the weather. Their mission is not to drive eyeballs to TV channels or clicks to websites by, quite literally, talking up the storm. It is not exactly what a certain President might call Fake News but modern forecasting definitely veers all too easily towards the hyperbolic

PS You can read here an article I wrote for The Spectator in 2021 on the how ‘freak’ weather events are really nothing of the sort.

Psst! Want to start a pot farm?

Over the past few years if you wanted to start a cannabis farm, I would surely have been your go to source for all the paraphernalia required. Compost, lighting, pots, shelving, hydroponic equipment – you name it I have had it all, bar the plants themselves (!), courtesy of fly tippers who have, on numerous occasions, chosen the gate entrance to a fishery of ours on the River Itchen as their dumping ground.

I was reminded of this recently for three reasons. Firstly, we were treated to another fly tip, but this time quite boring builder’s rubble and secondly a report by a House of Lords inquiry into the millions of tonnes of waste dumped in the countryside. The Lords report largely focussed on large-scale, organised crime tipping but I can tell you it is a real issue on a smaller, localised level. I can all but guarantee that if I took you out today for a drive around the Test valley, within less than fifteen minutes, we would come across at least one new fly tip. And from my observations these are far from organised but rather the dumping of unwanted household rubbish, sofas, mattresses and garden waste being particular favourites of those who cannot be bothered with the local tip, especially it seems at the weekend.

Pots from a pot farm .......

What happens to the rubbish depends on the exact position of the dump but essentially if it is on your land the removal is at your cost. However, I will give kudos to Winchester City Council who administer most of the Itchen valley, as they have an efficient app for the reporting and removal of fly tips, taking a relaxed view when it might be argued whether the rubbish is not on the public highway but on private land.

Oh, and the third reason was of course the monumental fly tip by the River Cherwell in Oxfordshire which the press rather primly noted as having ‘been reported by anglers’ as if we were some breed of strange litter vigilantes. Er, it was hundreds of metres long plus 20m wide and 10m deep. Now, guess who is in charge fly tipping regulation? Our old friends, the Environment Agency (EA) who were singled out for criticism in the House of Lords report that was published before news of the Cherwell dump emerged.

The evolution of this story tells you something about the EA. First of all, they responded that the dump had appeared overnight, which seemed a pretty incredible claim at the time considering the scale of it. However, this narrative has been ‘walked back’ the timeline now that it was first reported in May, but the local authority did not carry out a joint visit with the EA until July at which point a cease and desist letter was issued to the landowner but the dump continued to grow as the letter was sent to the wrong person!

Billy Burnell, chairman of a local angling club, monitored the site as it was active and growing bigger, asking the perfectly valid question as to why the EA, having issued the cease and desist notice, a copy of which was pinned to the site gate, were not more proactive in ending the dumping. Just imagine for a moment if the EA gets a report of large groups blatantly fishing without a licence at the same place on a regular basis. Are they going to pop down to pin a sign to the gate? Of course not. A full panoply of bailiffs would be dispatched, replete in stab vests and utility belts much beloved by paramilitary wannabes, ready to march off the miscreants to magistrate’s court followed by a naming and shaming in the local paper.

I truly do not understand the EA. It loves to sweat the small stuff (I could go on for hours about the petty regulation they impose on river management) whilst other much larger, blatant and egregious transgressions from river pollution to fly tipping get lost in a paper jungle.