Dragons and Damsels

Male merlin perched on a mossy lump

I had a week off earlier this month much of which I dodged the rain showers but to little avail and I had to settle for the odd often unexpected sunspot and a bonus of a merlin clutching a meadow pipit desperately trying to get airborne, only to be robbed by a massive raven. Poor beast I thought as the diminutive falcon slunk off deprived of lunch only to turn sharply and snatch a late summer time beauty from mid air, a large dragon fly.

Late July can often be a dull time for nature as most birds have fledged and they are hidden either in the leafy canopy or have moved from breeding grounds to other areas. As we have had a warmer than normal year so far with some wonderful spring sunshine, it could possibly be the bumper year we need after two particularly hard winters. One thing that is certain is that smaller creatures, the beetles, bees, bugs and other insects are certainly making hay whilst the weather is good.

To many chemicals

To many people bugs are pests but in reality out of the millions of species world wide only a tiny handful are actually true pests, most that we complain about are merely irritants, as they buzz about our heads and make a bee line for the jam (sorry). This doesn’t however stop us from reaching for the swat or more harmfully the chemicals to control them.

I got a call recently asking whether there were more bugs around than normal at this time of the year and I had to say that in reality there probably wasn’t as there is always a flush of abundance in summer. But the other harsh reality is that overall there definitely isn’t as many species or numbers of bugs around as there were in the past.

Lady bugs by the thousand

Why should that be important and why should we care, after all insects are pests?

Well for one, many of the birds species we all know and love and which we all moan about as their numbers are declining are doing so because of either secondary pesticide poisoning or the lack of insect food available, especially at breeding time. Lets face it everytime we see a bug we don’t want we reach for the spray, transfer that to an agricultural scale and you get mass extinctions on the scale of the dinosaurs, but because many are tiny little inconspicuous creatures that we rarely see, we don’t notice or care? This is a fact, three of the 25 British species of bumblebees are already extinct and half of the remainder have shown serious declines, often up to 70%, since around the 1970s. In addition, around 75% of all butterfly species in the UK have been shown to be in decline.

Now we all think this is a thing of the past and indeed we don’t use nearly as much chemicals as we used to; but the damage has been done and some cases unrepairable. Insects of all sorts play a massive role in our lives and indeed our survival yet we disregard them so easily.

Recent research has shown just how important many insects are to us least of which are those that are declining so much, bees and not just honey bees but all wild bees. Wild bees, ‘bumble bees’ are the unsung heroes of our food security and not as we once thought honey bees, it is these species we need to focus equally our conservation efforts, as insect pollinated crops are likely to become increasingly more important to UK agriculture in the immediate future.

Juvenile salmon parr

There is a long way to go as I saw when I was back in the Lake District for a few days recently. Reminiscing I stood on many of the same bridges I did as a kid around Uleswater looking down at the mysterious speckled inhabitants darting around the gin clear waters. Well, the streams still run gin clear but the speckled inhabitants are all but gone, no longer holding station sipping in a passing mayfly or dashing to snatch a falling grub. Taken not by the often quoted ‘too many predators syndrome’ but by insidious chemical poisons whose effects go on long gone after their initial use.

"It takes a long time to repopulate a stream from the tiniest inhabitant to the mightiest fish"