Where have all the insects gone?

Early last summer, I noticed something that really bothered me: While driving between Riley and Sisters on a nice, warm, early summer day, upon reaching my destination I noticed that I didn't have as many smashed insects on the windshield of my trusty old, 366,000-mile Toyota 4-Runner as I did earlier that spring. The weather and road conditions were right, but the insects just were not there.

The first time I made that trip was in mid-September 1951, astraddle my beautiful old 1947 Harley-Davidson motorcycle. I mounted a sport shield because beetles and larger insects really hurt when they hit my bare cheek when doing 70 mph, and back in those days there were more than enough insects to notice.

In my younger years I could even hear bees plainly when they smacked on the windshield of the car I was driving.

But last summer, something was out of whack. When I stepped out of the rig upon my arrival to buy gas at my favorite filling station on 97, I glanced at the windshield. Sure enough, not near as many insects were splattered there - no butterfly guts - and I wasn't imagining things.

"I'm not killing as many butterflies with the 4-Runner as I once did," I said offhand to my pal, fellow butterfly enthusiast and wife, Sue. "They're just not there..."

And she remarked, "Yes, I was noticing that, too."

"I think all the insects we do see nowadays are wearing gas masks and carrying red flags that say, 'HELP!'" Sue mused.

When I mention declining insects to some people, their response is, 'Good Riddance!' What they haven't stopped to consider is that the soil-grown food we eat is wholly dependent on insects for pollination, and insects in turn are the only food for a myriad of animals. E. O. Wilson has said it many times, "Insects are the little things that run the world." We need to celebrate, not denigrate, them.

Local retired family doctor Stu Garrett has been concerned about the declining population of our sage grouse. He's looked into habitat loss and the possibility of West Nile Virus impacting the grouse, but now he's exploring a possible link between insect loss and bird survival.

"The sage grouse chicks between zero and eight weeks need lots of insects and caterpillars or they die," he notes.

And then, that very afternoon, we received an e-mail from a pal of ours over in France telling us how alarmed French entomologists were becoming because of the disappearance of insect pollinators in eastern France and western Germany.

A recent article in the Washington Post by Ben Guarino entitled ""Hyperalarming' study shows massive insect loss," states, "In 2014, an international team of biologists estimated that, in the past 35 years, the abundance of invertebrates such as beetles and bees has decreased by 45 percent. A study last year showed a 76 percent decrease in flying insects in the past few decades in German nature preserves."

That, dear readers, sounds like mass extinction.

And we seem to be contributing to it: Our store shelves carry hundreds of gallon cans that contain chemical after chemical, all advertised to kill, kill, and kill.

Robert Michael Pyle, writer, author, butterfly expert, insect researcher and founder of the Xerces Society, a PNW research organization that champions invertebrates, had this to say in response to my concerns regarding disappearing insects:

"I agree with you that biocides are definitely one of the major factors leading to insect losses. There are many others, which Xerces has been working to identify and counteract for 47 years as of December 9!

"Habitat alteration, warming and drying with climate change, and intensification of agriculture are high among them - the latter has directly brought about most butterfly declines in the UK (see the excellent recent book, 'The Moth Snowstorm,' which details this history).

"But the huge chemical load in the environment is surely one of the leading causes of insect populations collapsing. In particular, the neonicotinoid pesticides are to bees and butterflies what organophosphates were to eagles, ospreys, and Rachel Carson's songbirds. Here is one place to read about this, on the Xerces website: http://xerces.org/neonicotinoids-and-bees. Europe, apparently, is making some progress on banning neonics, but they are everywhere over here.

"The recent articles about widespread insect decline have indeed been sobering, and even worse than we anticipated at the outset of Xerces. Several long-term butterfly monitoring programs are suggesting the same, though not everywhere, yet - we're still pretty well off in the Cascades. We can only hope it won't spread and get worse! I guess we must enjoy them all the more while they last. In any case, thanks for writing and thinking about it."

My gut feeling is we have (at last) saturated our world with chemicals, and insects are setting off the first alarm - no, I'll take that back. Perhaps the first alarm has been ringing for a long time - all the cancer that's plaguing our society.

Please take all that chemical goop in your garage and shop to the county chemical disposal site and keep it out of circulation. Please don't use any more for a convenient dose here and there. There are more than enough people growing gardens and flower beds with chemicals to saturate our soils with stuff that kills, kills, and kills.