Environmentally speaking, have crickets sung their swan song?
DEAR JOAN >> I live in Boise, Idaho, along a stream that is teeming with wildlife. I love it, but I have noticed in the past few years that the cricket song at night has completely gone away. It’s so sad.
We had frog noises, too, and those have gone away as well. All I hear now is street noise. I still hear bird songs, but that is quite diminished as well.
Strange, but even the fly problem has basically completely gone away. That’s great, but not so great environmentally speaking. I can smell dead creatures sometimes when I never have before.
I am an ex-soldier and a Montana farmboy, and this is plain bad.
This could mean that the microcosm of lower life forms could be going away. This should be alarming to the scientific community and to people at large, to say the least, but all I could find about it on Google was your article from 2016.
It’s not just here in Idaho. I travel a lot throughout the country, and a lot of people I’ve talked to say the same thing.
Nobody really complains, because pesky insects are bothersome in the best of situations, but people need to understand that this level of life is very necessary for the environment.
Case in point, I rarely used to open the back door to my balcony as I was constantly killing flies. It was a pain in the you-know-what, but now there’s no problem. I’m seriously afraid of spiders, and I rarely see them as well. I’m worried, and the people who have noticed the problem just don’t care. But most just don’t notice.
I explain to them that this isn’t good, but they just don’t get it. No fireflies, no dragonflies, no nothing. When you talk to younger people, they don’t even know what these things are.
As for me, I am very worried, coupled with all the other disturbing things that are going bad on our planet as a whole. I’m 50 now, and I am fearful for the future of my life in its golden years and the legacy we are leaving behind. It’s just so shameful how we are treating the only damn place we can live. — Matthew L. McPadden, Boise, Idaho DEAR MATTHEW >> You’re not alone. I also had a letter from Janet in Indiana, who is missing the sound of crickets as well.
Explaining the lack of insect life is like taking a shot in the dark. There are many issues that could be at play, but as my garage is regularly visited by crickets, I can tell you it’s not global extermination.
It’s very likely that in your case — and possibly Janet’s — someone has been very determined to get rid of “pests” through the use of insecticides. With no crickets and flies to eat, the frogs might also have moved on to other locations.
Wiping out all insect life on the planet is, thankfully, a difficult thing to do, but you can destroy and deplete them in pockets.
If you live in an apartment or have a landlord, talk to him or her about easing off the insecticides. If your neighbors are using them, ask them to back off, too.
You can help the insects recover by growing plants on your balcony and in your yard that will attract and support them.
Doing all of those things will help the insect population bounce back, and you will soon have flies buzzing through your open door and crickets singing you lullabies.