ecospirit

The sun was starting to set Saturday evening when we arrived at Flower Gap, so I didn’t look for flowers or insects. We had work to do before dark. The next morning was leisurely, since we had traversed by far the hardest nine of our fifteen-plus miles. After breakfast and striking the tent, I walked around the gap a bit. I was surprised that there were hardly any flowers, though the tall grasses, reeds and canes were exquisite. And I saw only one butterfly, a beautiful spicebush swallowtail, alighting on one of the few flowers. The previous day, I had seen another, smaller butterfly. A total of two butterflies in this mass of botanical beauty.

When I got home, I read the NY Times article, “The Silence of the Bugs.” Though the research is sketchy, mostly by amateurs, it turns out that, in Germany at least, there is only twenty percent of the number of bugs in midsummer peak bug season that there was a a few decades ago. This jives with my experience, at least with respect to lepidoptera. When we first moved to South Toe, moths covered our windows and night, and the butterflies of summer were prolific, as many as 60 swallowtails gathering for water in the late afternoons. Now, I’m really pleased to see, very rarely, as many as ten or twelve pipevine swallowtails on the road where they drink. Mostly, butterfly sightings are singles. And at night, just a few small whitish moths, not the large Cecropias and Lunas of yesteryear amid a sea of moths of all sizes and shapes. I blogged about this a few years backhttps://wearepassersby.wordpress.com/?s=where+are+the+butterflies, and the eery absence of butterflies at Flower(less) Gap has brought my brooding worry back.

The Times article can only speculate about the causes of the decline, which anecdotally seems to be global, not just in Germany, where it is documented. Pesticides are suspected, especially for species who spend part of their lives in water. But this is not the case with lepodoptera. And the Pisgah Wilderness is huge, has been around for a long time, and is upstream from the light agriculture of the polycultural Appalachian farmers in the valleys below. This particular case is truly a mystery. But EO Wilson, who is the most eminent of entomologists, says this of the situation: “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”