As soon as I wrote the title to this piece I realised it was an inadvertent homage to Lynne Truss’s entertaining book about punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves. (Have I apostrophised correctly? Even her very name is a trap for the unwary). Anyway, let’s not get distracted by etymology, because entomology is the subject of this article.
But we’ll start with that most exquisitely aerodynamic bird, the swallow.
It's summer here in Connemara and this year I’m lucky enough to have a flock of swallows who regularly circle and dive-bomb the house. They’re quite extraordinary birds – gorgeous and graceful, fast and fearless.
At first, I thought they might be house-martins. The two birds are similar and it was hard to clearly identify the pointy tails that indicate a swallow, since I was often squinting against a bright sky to see them. Then I caught them taking a rare break, perching in a row on the fence, and I could see the distinctive red throats.
Sometimes in the evenings I lie flat on the grass and look up, because that’s an excellent way to view swallows. If you haven’t lain in the grass for a while, you should try it. It smells lovely, and is conducive to mindless musing, I think because there is little for your gaze to alight on. Your eyes and your mind seem to enter a drift state. I highly recommend it.
Except, okay, full disclosure, in the evenings I’m usually joined by small flies, tiny midgie-type things. A few dabs of citronella oil on my clothes would probably help to deter them, but my flop-and-sprawl onto the grass is usually a spontaneous impulse and I’m unprotected as a result. I simply lie on the grass and occasionally scrub my hands over my face and shout the rude version of ‘go away’.
If a genie appeared, however, and said they could remove all the flies, I would have to regretfully refuse. Because if the flies went, I’d lose my swallows too.
Swallows like to eat on the move. They don’t sit down to meals like the bird-feeder gang, they turn their noses up at seeds and nuts. They are insectivores, and those small flies are their food.
Conventional farming (and chemical gardening for that matter) is a major problem for birds because conventional farmers want to get rid of certain types of insects, those that eat crops and hurt livestock. Unfortunately, they don’t discriminate between these insects and others that are harmless (or even helpful) and their methods simply wipe out entire insect populations.
John Humphry describes the consequences in his book, The Great Food Gamble:
Some species – such as the tree sparrow – were once abundant and are now approaching extinction. In the years since the boom sprayers began their conquest of the land and farmers changed their age-old practices, there has been a catastrophic decline in the numbers of bullfinch and song thrush, skylarks and linnets. The reasons are simple: birds eat insects or seeds. If the insects are killed as efficiently as modern pesticides allow, then the birds cannot feed themselves or their young. They either die out or they go elsewhere. If there are no weeds to produce seeds for the seed-eaters, it is the same sad story.
Conventional farmers are told that insecticides (along with fertilisers, fungicides and herbicides) are a necessary evil. Farmers who practice ecological agriculture – regenerative, holistic, organic – have learned that this is false.
Jonathan Lundgren, an entomologist from the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (if he still has that job, his work appears to be making him unpopular) says that there are only 3,000 insect pests in the world that eat crops and hurt livestock. That seems like a lot, until you learn that for each one of those pests, there are 3,000 beneficial insects – those that prey on the pests. Eco-friendly farmers manage their fields in ways that actually try to keep and maintain a lively insect population. There are four main benefits:
Ø You encourage predatory insects, which eat the harmful insects.
Ø The good insects also eat the seeds of weeds, so if you kill off your insect population (to get rid of one pest), you may be making it easier for weeds to dominate.
Ø You’re not contributing to the cultivation of super-pests that consistently develop resistance to the poisons designed to kill them.
Ø If you are farming crops that require pollination, you can’t do it without bees and insects.
Colour Wheel!! by Cath Hodsman. Image Source.
Insect-friendly farming is important because we are losing insects at a calamitous rate. A Guardian article highlighted a study which revealed that the insect population has plunged by 75 percent in nature reserves across Germany, in the short space of 25 years.
There have been previous studies worldwide that examined the decline of specific insects, such as butterflies, but this research captured all flying insects, which makes it a comprehensive – and alarming – indicator of decline.
It’s also incredibly disturbing that the data emerges from nature reserves. These are figures from areas that are protected and well-managed, which means they are the most optimistic figures we could hope for.
There are worrying implications for all landscapes dominated by agriculture, according to the researchers:
“Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline,” said Prof Dave Goulson of Susses University, UK, and part of the team behind the new study. “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”
Starting with the birds. No insects means no swallows. They are already on the amber list here in Ireland, with the entire European population having undergone a large historical decline.
So I realise that I’m lucky to see them. I tried to photograph them with my phone camera but all I got was endless shots of clear blue sky. Man, swallows can really move. Eleven metres a second, officially.
This photo comes from the IrishBirds website, where enthusiastic and talented twitchers post truly remarkable photographs. This is a red-rumped swallow, a different breed to the ones gracing my garden, but I couldn’t resist it because it basically looks like an airborne koi fish. It even has a slightly bemused expression, like: whoa, what am I doing up here? Their website and twitter-feed are a treasure trove of such shots.
Some people don’t like to think about ocean acidification, climate change, biodiversity loss or other planetary calamities, because they find it too intimidating and depressing. But I find that if you do think about it, it gives you a greater appreciation of what we have, while we have it.
You’re more inclined to go outside, lie down and look up.