Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman. Source photographs: Bridgeman Images.
Sune Boye Riis was on a bike ride with his youngest son, enjoying the sun slanting over the fields and woodlands near their home north of Copenhagen when it suddenly occurred to him that something about the experience was amiss. Specifically, something was missing.
It was summer. He was out in the country, moving fast. But strangely, he wasn’t eating any bugs.
For a moment, Riis was transported to his childhood on the Danish island of Lolland, in the Baltic Sea. Back then, summer bike rides meant closing his mouth to cruise through thick clouds of insects, but inevitably he swallowed some anyway. When his parents took him driving, he remembered, the car’s windshield was frequently so smeared with insect carcasses that you almost couldn’t see through it. But all that seemed distant now. He couldn’t recall the last time he needed to wash bugs from his windshield; he even wondered, vaguely, whether car manufacturers had invented […]
My experience in central North Carolina is reflected in this article. It seems the general population of all insects has crashed in the last three years in my area. Spring time brings few flying insects and even the annoying little black ants have disappeared from the kitchen. Without enough insects I am seeing very few small birds or in summer the bats at dusk.
Without question the 6th extinction is growing rapidly as we humans devalue and destroy our beautiful and only home with disregard for all other beings. Our fellow creatures are deserving of respect and are equal to us in their right to live on this planet. I feel deep sadness at the loss and the general unawareness/disinterest by most. The trumpian chaos pulls more of us under until real reality intervenes; Puerto Rico, Houston, Paradise…
This extinction is leading to our very own, without question!