Please Don’t Stop Bugging Me
It is the promise of laurel flowers, blueberries, and pond lilies that see me through the grey days when winter refuses to loosen its grip on the pond.
After the last laurel petal has fallen into the pond and the white bells on the blueberry bushes have turned into little green berries, there is another constant that I look forward to each year.
It is the appearance of two bugs or insects. (I’m not sure which. I probably skipped school when we studied insect classification in biology class.) I greet these two as old friends every summer, whether they be insects or bugs.
One of them likes to land on my kayak or my bare leg where my shorts end. It seems as if this bug waits for me at the same bend in the river to accompany me on my morning paddle. So often, this bug is still sitting there when I return to the cabin. I have to nudge her off, so I don’t squash her when I pull my kayak out of the water and hoist it onto the rack.
My other insect friends look like tiny fairies dancing above the pond’s surface in the sky. They are magical. Pure delight. Sometimes they fly too close to the water’s surface and get caught in the water; other times, a bird will swoop down and gobble them up for breakfast.
It is my sixteenth summer living on the pond. I have watched and waited for the tiny dancing fairy bugs to appear every year. Only this year, they haven’t. Not a single one. As for my friend that sits on my leg, or kayak, as I paddle? She has only appeared once this summer.
I wonder, is it possible that the bug’s disappearance from the pond is a natural fluctuation? Could it be similar to a banner year of acorns or blueberries, followed by a sparse season? Maybe I haven’t lived here long enough to observe this cycle.
I want to believe this is true, but I have my doubts.
When I got home to the cabin, I investigated online. Some scientists warn that a rapidly declining insect population could signal a coming general collapse of worldwide ecosystems. Whereas some studies in North America have reported no significant change, that most insect species had stable numbers.
Interesting side note: While I was reading these online articles, advertisements for pest control companies kept popping up in my feed.
Like the rest of the world, New England is in the middle of a drought, and the water level on the pond is eerily low. According to the SPEI Global Drought Monitor, no continent, except Antarctica, has been spared from drought this year.
I’m not a scientist, and I don’t have any baseline data to allow me to see a pattern developing in the insect community on the pond. However, I feel that a decline in insect populations anywhere in the world is alarming. We are all interconnected. I believe that how I caretake this little spot of the earth on the pond impacts the rest of the world.
I let the vegetation on the pond’s edge grow undisturbed, leaving only enough space to get myself and kayak into the water. A part of me would love to have a perfectly manicured lawn sloping down from the cabin to the water. However, that would require the use of chemicals. So instead, I appreciate the cornucopia of plants that grow in place of a mono-crop of grass.
The scientific community and all its studies cannot measure what I know in my heart to be true. We are destroying Mother Earth. I hear her cries. My bug friends have virtually vanished this summer. I miss them, and I am worried.
With Love & Energy by the Pond,
Laurel
