INDEX	August 16, 2023
Went swimming in Barrow this morning and as I walked through the park towards the pool, an elderly gent, clearly distressed, started to talk to me. He seemed to have a problem with his teeth since he was mostly spraying it rather than saying it (as my parents used to say). His anxiety was not about dentistry, or the state of the NHS (though it probably should have been) but about Swifts. These birds, he said, had disappeared and he missed their shrill calls. He thought the reason was that all the small flying insects, food for the Swifts, had gone and he feared that so too had the Swifts. He was worried that if there were no Swifts to fly back to Africa then none could return next year. Any Swifts that happened to survive would have lost the knowledge of the migration, so no more Swifts, at least as we know them. I've been walking through what we call fells up here, quite a lot lately, and there didn't seem to be a shortage of biting flying insects, but maybe he is right (in Barrow at least). Years ago some types of Sparrow disappeared in urban areas like London and one cause was felt to be the kind of petrol used at the time since it was believed it was killing off the insects. There was a time when you could not drive for a long distance without getting bugs on your windscreen. Does that happen any more? If it doesn't I blame monoculture, but then that's one of my favourite bug bears and I tend to blame it for a lot of things.
INDEX Jonathan Brind		August 16, 2023