Why absence of dead insects on windscreens is sign of staggering changes to nature since 1970s

The current rate of extinction of species is up to 1,000 times higher than the average for the past ten million years

I don’t know about you, but I find summer days bring childhood memories flooding back. Long, balmy days filled with endless play. I remember well the 1970s. Dad driving us down country lanes in his Hillman Super Minx with its windscreen covered in splatted insects. The headlights too had a blanket of little bodies. As for reading the number plate, well, that was nearly impossible.

Every weekend, Dad would have bucket and sponge in hand as he washed away the result of the latest car journey. Back then, our flourishing insect population meant yet another task for Dad as he got ready for church on Sunday.

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Now, things are very different. Bugs rarely make much of a mark on today’s windscreens. There are far fewer of them. When I recall how things used to be to young family members, they are incredulous. Not something they’ve ever known.

A swarm of long-tailed mayflies on the Tisza River in Hungary. Similar sights are increasingly rare in the UK (Picture: Csaba Segesvari/AFP via Getty Images)A swarm of long-tailed mayflies on the Tisza River in Hungary. Similar sights are increasingly rare in the UK (Picture: Csaba Segesvari/AFP via Getty Images)
A swarm of long-tailed mayflies on the Tisza River in Hungary. Similar sights are increasingly rare in the UK (Picture: Csaba Segesvari/AFP via Getty Images)
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‘Shifting baseline syndrome’

It brings home how perceptions change. How declines can become normalised. Not even recognised. Something called ‘shifting baseline syndrome’. A term to describe how things become invisible to subsequent generations. How things slip out of view. Lost as if they were never there. Like the disappearance of insects and wildlife generally. What we consider a healthy, living countryside now, past generations would see as degraded.

The sheer enormity of the latest scientific findings on biodiversity loss are staggering. Despite growing awareness, there is no let-up in the loss. So much so that the place in which I grew up, the UK, is known as one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.

Birds and the bees

Bees have been identified as the number one endangered species that we should save. A third of what we eat relies on these insects for pollination. Yet numbers have almost halved in the past 25 years. Bees have become the emblem for what’s going wrong in the countryside.

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On the bird front, I’ve lost count of the times we’ve talked at my local group about how lapwing numbers have dropped. Lapwings now have the dubious reputation of being the most rapidly declining bird species in Europe. I’ve lived on a farm hamlet now for seven years without ever seeing a lapwing. Nor a hedgehog for that matter.

The tragedy is that our biodiversity is declining faster than it has at any other time in human history, driven not least by the industrialisation of agriculture. The current rate of extinction is up to 1,000 times higher than the average over the past ten million years. And it’s still accelerating.

Magical memories

This devastating loss has now become a planetary crisis. Doing something about it has never been more important. After all, there is no planet B. That’s why it’s so important to do what we can to preserve the countryside for childhood memories of the future.

And what better way than by helping those younger than ourselves to see what once was, and could be again. That they don’t have to accept loss as ‘the norm’. That magical memories full of life should be shared by us all.

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Philip Lymbery is chief executive of Compassion in World Farming, a former United Nations Food Systems Champion and an award-winning author. His latest book is Sixty Harvests Left: How to Reach a Nature-Friendly Future. Philip is on X/Twitter @philip_ciwf

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