The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (14 page)

All across the land, they tumbled in numbers, the birds, the wild flowers, the butterflies, and it is clear that more than half of all Britain’s wildlife, as it existed at the end of the Second World War, has now gone. If we were to take just a single statistic, the key one would be the farmland bird index figure from 1970 onwards, which the government now publishes. The most recent index, for 2013, showed the combined population of nineteen farmland bird species, from skylarks to lapwings, from grey partridges to yellowhammers, at 56 per cent below the 1970 level, so even by the British government’s own admission, we have lost, just since The Beatles broke up, more than half the birds which once so delighted visitors to the countryside, and as they had been declining for virtually two decades before the index start date, the real figure is obviously much larger; and so with the insects; and so with the flowers.

This was the great thinning; this was the destruction of wild-life abundance in my country, at the hands of the farmers. As I was born in the same year as the piece of legislation which first gave them their price support and thus launched intensification – the Agriculture Act, 1947 – the process has precisely paralleled my own life. I was just lucky that the natural plenty of wild things survived long enough for me to encounter it in childhood and for it to leave an impression that has never faded, even though the profusion itself has melted away entirely and a child born in the generations after mine can never know it. It’s bad enough that individual species are hard to find. The pearl-bordered fritillary, for example, a jewel of an insect, was described thus in J. W. Tutt’s
British Butterflies
of 1896 (‘A Handbook for Students and Collectors’): ‘This is a very common woodland butterfly in England, haunting the flowery openings and sides of almost every wood of any size.’ You will travel a
long way to see one now. Try finding a corn bunting, stout yet perky with its song like a bunch of dropped keys, or even more, try finding any of the cornfield wild flowers, the arable plants, which once splashed the crops with colour – cornflower, corn marigold, corn buttercup, pheasant’s eye – they survive in just a few secluded corners. But even more than the single species, it’s the loss of abundance itself I mourn, and I know that some of the baby boomers, in whose lifetimes it disappeared, mourn it too. People over the age of fifty can remember springtime lap-wings crying and swooping over every field, corn buntings alert on each hedge and telegraph wire, swallow aerobatics in every farmyard and clouds of finches on the autumn stubbles; they remember nettle beds swarming with small tortoiseshell and peacock caterpillars, the sparkling pointillist palette of the hay meadows, ditches crawling and croaking with frogs and toads and even in the suburbs, songbird-speckled lawns and congregations of house martins in their dashing navy-blue elegance . . . but most vividly of all, some of them remember the moth snowstorm.

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Moths have long been unloved. There are about a dozen mentions of moths in the Bible and all of them are unfavourable: they are wretched little brown things akin to rust, which eat your clothes, as well as your books and your tapestries, if you believe the Good Book, and nothing more. The prejudice has been persistent: people have for centuries seen moths as haunting the night, like owls and bats, like ghosts and goblins and evil-doers, and thus sinister and shudder-provoking, whereas butterflies, their relatives, eternally symbolise sunshine and have been adored. Yet in my own country of Britain, perceptions are changing. Lovers of the natural world are becoming more and more drawn to moths, many of which are every bit as big and as bold in
their colour schemes as butterflies are, such as the black and cream and orange Jersey tiger, or the pink and green elephant hawkmoth, or even the legendary Clifden nonpareil, the outsize and shadowy species which shows on its underwings a sumptuous colour found nowhere else in the moth world: lilac blue. The difficulty of seeing them at night can easily be circumvented with a moth trap, essentially just a powerful light attached to a box, which exists in several designs but is always based on the same principle: moths are attracted to light, moths fall into box, moths settle down and go to sleep, and then can be released perfectly unharmed in the morning – after you’ve had a close look at them and identified them. This may seem like prime nerd territory, and sure, it may be, but the number of nerds is soaring: according to the charity Butterfly Conservation, there may now be as many as ten thousand enthusiasts in Britain operating moth traps in their gardens on summer nights. I am one of them.

When you do that, you start to realise for the first time a basic wildlife truth: it is moths, not butterflies, which are the senior partners in the order Lepidoptera, the scale-wing insects, even if in our culture, the positions have been reversed. For there are about 200,000 moth species in the world, as a ballpark figure, but only about 20,000 butterflies: butterflies are just a branch, halfway down, on the moth evolutionary tree, a group of moths which split off and evolved to fly by day, and developed bright colours to recognise each other. This disparity in species numbers is even more pronounced in Britain, where there are a mere 58 regularly breeding butterfly species, but about 900 larger moths (all with English common names) and another 1,600 or so smaller or micro-moths (which for the most part have only scientific names in Latin), for a total of about 2,500. Thus, in the world as a whole, there may be ten times as many moth species as butterfly species; but in Britain, it is approaching fifty times as many.

This means, of course, that in the dark there are far, far more moths out and about than ever there are butterflies during the daytime; it’s just that we don’t see them. Or at least, we didn’t, until the invention of the automobile. The headlight beams of a speeding car on a muggy summer’s night in the countryside, turning the moths into snowflakes and crowding them together the faster you went, in the manner of a telephoto lens, meant that the true startling scale of their numbers was suddenly apparent, not least as they plastered the headlights and the wind-screen until driving became impossible, and you had to stop the car to wipe the glass surfaces clean. (I know there are many other insects active at night as well, but let the moths stand proxy for the rest.) Of all the myriad displays of abundance in the natural world in Britain, the moth snowstorm was the most extraordinary, as it only became perceptible in the age of the internal combustion engine. Yet now, after but a short century of existence, it has gone.

In recent years I have often talked to people about it, and I am surprised, not just at how many of those over fifty (and especially over sixty) remember it, but at how animated they become once the memory is triggered. It’s as if it were locked away in a corner of their minds, and in recalling it and realising that it has disappeared, they can recognise what an exceptional phenomenon it was, whereas at the time, it just seemed part of the way things were. For example, I talked about it to one of Britain’s best-known environmentalists, Peter Melchett, the former director of Greenpeace UK and now the policy director of the Soil Association, the pressure group for organic farming. As soon as I raised the subject he said: ‘I remember being at a meeting with Miriam Rothschild [the celebrated natural scientist], and Chris Baines was there, the TV naturalist, the guy who founded the Birmingham Wildlife Trust, and we were talking about the loss of insects in general and the loss of moths in particular, as Miriam was a great moth expert, and I said I
remembered in the fifties driving from Norfolk to London with my dad, and him having to stop to wipe the windscreen and the headlights two or three times during every journey, so he could see.’ He laughed. ‘And Chris Baines said, it was all very well for you, being driven around in a flash car – for me, you couldn’t bicycle with your mouth open, because you would swallow so many insects.’

I looked up Chris Baines, and he laughed in turn, and said it was true. He said: ‘Yes, I remember it very well, having to scrape the windscreen and the headlights clear of insects, but I did also experience it on my bike. I used to cycle to Cubs or to church choir practice and you would get them in your eye, or if you had your mouth open, you ended up spitting out bits of moth wing, there were just so many in the air on any evening.’ He thought about it for a moment and he said: ‘If you drove down any kind of hollow way, like a country lane with hedges on both sides, you would be driving through a terrific mass of insects, and now that never happens. I remember it until my twenties. It’s difficult to be precise, but I was a student in Kent, at Wye College, and my recollection is that it was still the case then, in the late 1960s, but not after that, really. It certainly never happens now. We spend a lot of time in rural Wales, driving in north Wales, and there have been evenings when I have commented that we’ve seen a moth. It’s almost literally that – one or two moths in a journey. That’s a completely different kind of situation from when I was growing up.’

It was in the millennium year, 2000, that I myself began to realise that the moth snowstorm had disappeared, and I began to write about it as part of the issue of insect decline as a whole, which seemed to me to be wide-ranging and extremely serious – the honeybees and the bumblebees were declining, the beetles were disappearing, the mayflies on the rivers were plunging in numbers – but very under-appreciated: no one was interested in it. Yet every time I wrote about the snowstorm, people would
respond. They would say how vividly they remembered it, and how now they never saw it, and a frequent memory was of the long drive to the coast for the summer holiday in July or August (in the fifties, Spanish beaches were still in the future) when the car windscreen would unfailingly be insect-plastered; and then it all stopped. The experts remembered it just like the members of the public. Mark Parsons, the principal moth man at Butterfly Conservation, recalled it vividly from twenty or thirty years earlier, but he said to me: ‘I may have seen it once or twice in the last decade.’

All this was just anecdotal, of course. There were no scientific figures for moth decline, as Britain’s community of naturalists, enthusiastic though they were, had never got round to creating monitoring surveys for moths like they had done for birds, wild flowers, and butterflies. It was merely memories. Then one day the figures suddenly appeared.

They came from an unexpected source: Rothamsted, the celebrated agricultural research station in Hertfordshire (the oldest agricultural research station in the world, in fact, with experiments on the effects of fertilisers on crops going back to 1843). From 1968 Rothamsted had operated, through volunteers, a nationwide network of moth traps, the data from which had been used, within the station itself, to study various aspects of insect population dynamics. But in 2001 it was perceived that one well-known, widespread and common moth, the strikingly beautiful garden tiger, appeared to be collapsing in numbers. As a result, the Rothamsted scientists began to analyse the long-term population trends of 337 larger moth species regularly caught in the traps over the full thirty-five-year period the network had been running, from 1968 to 2002. The results, made public in conjunction with Butterfly Conservation on 20 February 2006, were astounding: they showed Britain’s moth fauna to be in freefall. Wholly unsuspected in its scale, the position was even worse than that of the birds, the wild flowers,
and the butterflies. Of the 337 species examined, two-thirds were declining: 80 species had declined by 70 per cent or more, and 20 of these had gone down by over 90 per cent. In southern Britain, three-quarters of moth species were tumbling in numbers; their total cumulative decline since 1968 was estimated at 44 per cent, while in urban areas, the losses were estimated at 50 per cent. The snowflakes which had made up the snowstorm were simply no longer there.

It had been the most powerful of all the manifestations of abundance, this blizzard of insects in the headlights of cars, this curious side effect of technology, this revelatory view of the natural world which was only made possible with the invention of the motor vehicle. It was extraordinary; yet even more extraordinary was the fact that it had ceased to exist. Its disappearance spoke unchallengeably of a completely unregarded but catastrophic crash in Britain of the invertebrate life which is at the basis of so much else. South Korea may have destroyed Saemangeum, and China may have destroyed its dolphin, but my own country has wreaked a destruction which is just as egregious: in my lifetime, in a process that began in the year I was born, in this great and merciless thinning, it has obliterated half its living things, even though the national consciousness does not register it yet. That has been my fate as a baby boomer: not just to belong to the most privileged generation which ever walked the earth, but, as we can at last see now, to have my life parallel the destruction of the wondrous abundance of nature that still persisted in my childhood, the abundance which sang like nothing else of the force and energy of life and could be witnessed in so many ways, but most strikingly of all in the astonishing summer night display in the headlight beams, which is no more.

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But if we know full well why half our wildlife has gone – step forward, Farmer Giles, with your miserable panoply of poisons – the reason for the disappearance of one particular part of it, London’s sparrows, remains a mystery entirely.

How utterly bizarre that it should happen to him, the Cockney sparrer! The urban survivor par excellence! The bird that has lived alongside humans since human settlements began twelve thousand years ago . . . the bird which is wholly at home in the city . . . what is it that, in one of the world’s greatest cities where previously it flourished, has destroyed its population? To this day, more than twenty years after the event, nobody knows.

The phenomenon is all the more perplexing in that in major cities ostensibly very similar in infrastructure and atmosphere to London, such as Paris or New York or Washington, sparrows are flourishing still, darting in their flocks around the feet of the tourists in hope of the dropped crumb or the piece of ice-cream cone. Yet in Britain’s capital, over the decade of the 1990s, the population collapsed, and the birds vanished almost completely. Within the London sparrow ecosystem, something mysterious, something catastrophic, took place. But even now, no one has worked out what.