HL Mencken: "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
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On the hike last weekend, somehow the subject turned to bats. I mentioned that I'd always had bats swooping all around my property every evening, but this year I hadn't seen any. One of the guys said there's been an outbreak of "white nose syndrome", and the bats are dying.
Later, I was thinking about that.
There's something very wrong around here.
With the bats gone, there should be more insects, but there aren't.
There are no mosquitoes. No little biting black flies.
I'm used to seeing beautiful darning needles, damsel flies, and dragonflies on the deck, but I haven't seen any in two years, at least.
The back yard is usually full of hundreds of tiny white and blue butterflies, and smatterings of more colorful butterflies on migration, especially Monarchs visiting the milkweed in the front. I haven't seen more than an occasional butterfly in two or three years.
The flowering shrub under the den window has been, in the past, so full of fat bumblebees that I can hear the buzz in the den. I haven't seen a bee in ages. Even the paper wasps that built nests on my porch roof and inside the car's gas flap are missing.
Peepers, little tree frogs, thousands of them, used to sing to me at night, along with the bass of the bullfrogs in the pond down the hill. The peepers used to be attracted to the sliding glass doors, because flying insects were attracted by the light, and then I'd hear the crash of an owl against the glass as they plucked off a froggy dinner. I haven't seen or heard a frog or owl in two years, at least, and there are few if any insects at the glass. We used to get huge green luna moths. None now.
The frogs sang me to sleep, and the birds twittered me awake, and there was birdsong all day. Not this year. I don't know when it stopped, but it has stopped. Now I might hear one or two birds in the morning, and none at all all day!
The foxes abandoned the den in the front yard years ago, when we had the rabies outbreak, and the hole was taken over by groundhogs. It was usual to see one or two adults and a few babies in the yard. I know the groundhogs are still around, because they are maintaining the hole entrance, but I've seen no babies or juveniles.
In early summer my yard used to be full of fireflies, from the ground to the tops of the trees. This year and last year there were a few in the wooded section, and they weren't around long. They weren't being eaten by bats or frogs, so where are they?
I haven't had a mouse in the house since spring of last year. It's very unusual to go through a winter without hearing them rioting in the attic. The basement is suspiciously free of droppings.
Something is very wrong.
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2 comments:
When I lived in Florida, I could hear the whippoorwills in the spring. At least, when I first moved there. By the time I moved back to Jersey, they were gone. Victims of progress.
Could it be with the cooler weather (theoretically) moving north, these critters have gone with it?
Have you or your neighbors been using Roundup? Google "Roundup dangers" and you will see a days worth of reading on the product that literally effects the entire food chain.
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