We need more Shit

Publication of the German study* into catastrophic insect decline doesn't surprise me. In protected nature reserves surrounded by intensively farmed land they found a 75% decline in insect biomass over the past 27 years. The same is true in England - though like the slowly boiled frog, I hardly noticed it when I noticed it at all. No, it took a move to a high valley here in Austria at the edge of a nature reserve and isolated from the lowland areas that grow crops to show me in dramatic fashion what was missing.  

This really is an 'I told you so' moment for me. Through Spring and Summer I've been threatening to write a pamphlet for local circulation to be entitled 'Ecology begins with flies'. The valley used to be scattered with small farms in which up to half a dozen milk cows kept for most of the year in barns were supplied by cutting hay from the slopes two or three times a year; the waste from the stalls was scattered over the meadow once a year, normally in the Spring, and the cows got a few months on the gentler slopes after the last cut had been taken and before they went back inside for the Winter. It was an age-old way of feeding families from stock kept sustainably on marginal land. Change came only in the past twenty years when the desire for modernity meant Austrians wanted piles of dung, animal smells and dirt roads across pastureland replaced with clinically clean houses and smooth, metalled roads for their new cars. 

When I visited a cousin here in 1980 they ran their micro-farm on exactly these principles. The four milk cows chewed contentedly in their stalls, a goat or two, hens scrabbling around the yard, avoiding the buzzard's swooping attacks and a Haflinger horse - Lottie - to work the steep land. With the EU and prosperity came loans for tractors, and as horses and carts were portrayed as somehow third-world, primitive and 'dirty' they rapidly disappeared. Then the cows went, and finally the goats and chickens. Now even the remaining feral barn cats are under threat - owners must legally neuter them. If you've ever had a feral barn cat, you'll know that the concept of 'ownership' doesn't apply; you're lucky to see it, though any food offerings you care to make are swiftly taken.

Anyway, the ecology that all this supported is still here, though I suspect somewhat diminished. I have on my land grass snakes, toads, fire salamanders and slow worms beyond counting; in season, the crickets are deafening, and from the appearance of the very first Spring flowers a kaleidoscopic procession of species of butterfly follows each new plant blooming. We have garden spiders with bodies the size of marrowfat peas and spindly house spiders that spin energetically. We have black redstarts - old world insect eaters - each pair of which can eat 1.5kg of flies during a breeding season. And of course we have flies, beetles, insects beyond measure. I've also seen tits, thrushes, corvids, red fox, the pair of buzzards on the mountain behind and of course Roe deer, which leap metre high fences without thinking and which I can see from my study window grazing at the forest margin each day.

But I know from signs of past habitation that numbers are down. There are traces of six old Black Redstart nesting sites in the barn; this year we had just two pairs. And there are already gaps in the wildlife. And I just know this is due to both the obsessive standards of domestic cleanliness in modern Austria and the decline of micro-farms - both of which reduce the insect biomass. In the lowland valleys where pesticides are used it must be far, far worse.  Yes, they value nature and ecology here but fondness tends to start with beavers and up, the larger mammals, not flies. But without insect pollinators some plants will drop out of the ecosystem, this will knock on to sensitive amphibian and reptile populations, to avian presence and then the larger mammals will disappear.

I also know that to keep my own land healthy I need more animal shit. I need sheep, and hens and three or four hives of bees. So far I've been too busy renovating the house to stock the pastures, but I feel a terrible urgency from the German report. I need feed-bins with enough spilt feed to attract barn mice to encourage the owl to return to his abandoned residence - and maybe to feed the illegal, unknown barn cat. I need meadows scattered with dung, I need hens scattering seeds. Above all I need flies.   

*Hallmann CA, Sorg M, Jongejans E, Siepel H, Hofland N, Schwan H, et al. (2017) More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas. PLoS ONE12(10): e0185809. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185809