Where Have all the Insects Gone?

I was born in the long hot brown burnt summer of 1976 that saw England invaded by swarms of ladybirds. I know because I've seen crackly television footage of seaside-day trippers fighting the minute dragons off along the Sussex coast. Perhaps that is why I became a zoologist, perhaps some summer bugs got under my skin before I could even walk.

But my memories are full of fat, giant ants. We used to call the days they swarmed 'giant ant days' and I would drop their soft, bulbous bodies into the aquarium where I kept my frog. His tongue would unwind like a strawberry chew and whip the pregnant insect into his flabby jaw in less than a second. I haven't seen a 'giant ant day' for many years although it is said that they swarm in Britain every summer. Perhaps they don't come to the city. It was a crawling mass, the novelty of the day lay in the sheer scale and numbers. We'd lie outside in the prickly shorts and nylon t-shirts of the seventies and let the creatures stumble over us and those with wings would fly by in droves. I often wondered where they were going. If I had known that wherever they were going it was not into my own future I might have stayed in the garden a little longer, after my brothers had gone to sleep, until the sunset.

Often we would find a big, male stag beetle blundering across our drive with his ferocious antlers bowed down. We'd poke at him and dare one another to put our fingers in his claws. If I'd known that one day I'd search vainly for these shy, endangered creatures I would have taken a little longer to watch the summer bouncing off their black satiny backs. If I had known what I had then I would have perhaps cherished it more. I wouldn't have drowned bees in the paddling pool or pulled the legs off daddy-long-legs. I would never have squashed the maybugs against the window where they frantically scritched at the glass with their barbed legs and prickly wingcases that crackled. Somebody told me that if a may bug got caught up in your hair you could never untangle it and it would have to be cut out. I would give all my hair just to have those gnarled and nobbly warriors back in my life.

If I had known that all the dragonflies and waterboatmen would disappear, I would have pushed my dinghy further out into lake Bouldermere and I would have swam out into the weir more often to listen to their whirring wings and to feel the sun drying the silt onto my face. If I had known that the orchestra of crickets would disband then I may have listened to their performance every night and asked for an encore.

So I'm waiting vainly for a summer when the life might leap from the nests and burrows and grasses and trees, just like it did in the eighties. I'm waiting to make amends to all the tortured insects. I am begging with God and with them. Please come back.