Apparently that thing, society, must urgently take note that bugs don’t splatter on windscreens any more. Remember society? From Latin societatem (nominative societas) meaning "fellowship, association, alliance, union, community," based on socius "companion, ally”. Yeah, I remember it too - vaguely.
I have to wonder at a society that gets it’s knickers knotted over bugless windscreens, while doing everything possible to avoid exactly such kinds of unpleasantness.
So no, I refuse to take note. I call bullshit on it. Making buglessness out to be a problem is hypocrisy hiding behind clickbait.
Allegedly society could, until quite recently, hardly move their cars out of their driveways without having their windshields sullied with bug splatter. Are there fewer bugs now than, say ten years ago? Yes and no, depending on where or how you lived or live, then and now.
For example, some years ago we planted a few hemp plants after learning that they attract butterflies. A few came, but the hoverflies outnumbered them hugely. I was disappointed. Then suddenly one year, our hemp plants were encrusted with Red Admiral butterflies. The next year, again only a few. Why the yoyo?
The mystery was solved after I discovered, only recently, that the preferred plant host for the Red Admiral’s larvae is stinging nettle. Would you believe it, the year we had hundreds of Red Admirals, was also the year we had a huge infestation of stinging nettles at one end of the garden. Of course my OCD made me dig them out, root and stalk. Since hemp is also highly invasive if you don’t know or think to crop the flowers before they spread their seeds, I dug those out too. Now all we have are cabbage whites looking for cabbages, which we had planted one year. The larvae had very kindly eaten them for us and they wanted more.
You see, the lack of bugs is only to be expected, considering our ingrained hatred of weeds like nettles. I can only apologise for all the dock and dandelion I have dug up over the years. I wonder at how many other beneficial species have shunned me for being a weed nazi.
But our braindead media have expert ‘splanations for bugless windshields that society must chew on, ranging from cars are more aerodynamic now via climate change, pesticides, and herbicides to they have all been harvested to make doritos, bugburgers, twinkies and chipdip - I just made that up - not sorry.
As is their wont and only pleasure, the ignorant and logically challenged media have self-assembled into a greek chorus of hand-wringers and pearl-clutchers chanting woe on us all. One might think that someone would say a word or two about what to do? Not even a tiny cocktail sausage! Hand wringing and pearl clutching are entirely sufficient, because we should all … do something, you know?
So then, a quiçk quiz. Which of these four characters have abandoned windshield-splattering for a living? Answer in the caption.
The ones that don’t splatter are the backup system!
Let us therefore reexamine the premise more closely - bugs don’t splatter on windscreens any more.
Now let me see; unless we are homeless or hermits or hunter-gatherers or live in slums, most of us live in places that look like one or more of these:
I don’t see lots of reasons for bugs to come looking for windshields, do you?
Moving on, food production is now so efficient that we in the west can afford to waste almost as much as we eat, thanks to monoculture farms that look like this:
The bugs that might have lived there before would have needed - I can hardly say it - weeds. Can you see any in the picture? Nor can I. Thank you uncle Glyphosphate.
Obviously, these places are sterile and bugs don’t do sterile.
Tropical jungles, savannahs, wetlands and alpine regions do not lack for bugs. Try camping in such a place without taking bug spray if you dare. Bugs even thrive in dirty slums - not lovely butterflies and such, but bugs nevertheless.
No less a source than Phys Org manages to admit grudgingly, albeit deep inside a typically doom laden article, that:
Relatively high proportions of insect species achieved adequate protection in Amazonia, Saharo-Arabia, Western Australia, the Neotropics, the Afrotropics, and Central Europe …
Note my emphases - they can’t even say the words without weaseling.
Let us acknowledge that if these bugless windscreens are indeed a problem, then they are a problem belonging strictly to rampant consumer societies, where people crowd together in sterile environments by choice. Let us further acknowledge that humans live where and in the way we do to suit our personal needs.
It’s the same for bugs.
Insects need and thrive in environments with a diversity of plants, many of which are anathema to urban gardeners and monoculture farming. I mean plants that are ruthlessly uprooted and even poisoned because they are, shock horror, weeds.
I give livestock farmers a qualified pass. They inadvertently manage to avoid sterile. For one thing, the cattle bring their own damned bugs, and for another, I can’t imagine a sterile livestock farm. Yet many livestock farmers do have a vice; a tendency to over graze their pastures. Where I live we have a number of them. All look like this, and this one is quite good!
Here the effect of over grazing is more obvious:
Bugs thrive best where the environment looks more like this in summer, but bigger and with more of them scattered about, and not as tidy:
Try to imagine what that scene looks like in the dead of winter. It will be a drab scene of grey and brown brush with plant stalks here and there. It may be covered in snow. In there, unseen, will be all kinds of bugs, larvae and nymphs, even amphibiae and mice, snugly overwintering. Even some hardy flying insects may huddle there if they hatched too late in the season to migrate to warmer climes. And there will certainly be pupae waiting to hatch when warm weather returns.
Pastures can also be effective insect ecosystems if farmers would only fence them off into camps and rotate the animals through them regularly. It’s called productive pasture management. The cows and sheep love it because they don’t end up picking bits of food out of their shit everywhere they dine.
So it’s not because the bugs have all died and woe is us. It’s because the bugs live where sterile is not - places where they can do that weird thing that they do.
Metamorphosis!
There are three kinds. A detailed discussion would take too much space, so pictures will have to do - for more detail I suggest ThoughtCo - I thank them for their pictures.
From those we can tell that when we see a butterfly or any flying insect, we only see one quarter of all the forms in which the animal must survive to keep the show going. If it’s a cicada, we are seeing one third.
Eggs, nymphs, larvae or pupae do not splatter because (duh) they can’t fly.
Having said all that and going back to the greek choruses, if society really wants to see bugs back on suburban windscreens, then it will have to curb its OCD driven cravings for sterility and learn how to enjoy a few slightly messy, but still nice areas where we live. That will require management, some manual labour and above all, commitment by more than a few local eccentrics.
I am so not holding my breath.
If, as is more likely, society can’t be arsed to do the hard honest work required, we will have to get used to knowing that bugs simply don’t give a shit if we live or die in our neat manicured suburbs and paved-over cities. All they care about is life, and they have plenty of options for living it where we are not. More so if we disappear, which is likely to happen before bugs do.
Conclusion: Bug free windscreens are a feature of human lifestyles, not a bug.
In rant two I will rant:
More about bug life than you really want to know, because it’s my rant not yours,
About why studies seeking to prove that insects are in decline everywhere, are
bullshitflawed. - Hints: self absorption, statistics, computer models, fraud, andWhy homo insapiens1 will more likely become extinct before insects do. Hints: it’s the right thing to do, demographics, lack of diversity. Yeah, all of those.
Modern Latin: insapiens, present participle of insapere; "unwise"
Plenty of bugs around my house, most likely because my lawn is nothing but weeds. I cannot find it in myself to care about my lawn to the point of obsessiveness; unlike my retired neighbor (who also happens to be quite the curmudgeon) who is out tending to his every day.