THE SILENCE ON THE WINDSCREEN

The insect apocalypse isn’t coming. It already came, quietly, and nobody gave it a prime-time slot.

Anyone who grew up in the back of a car in the 1960s and 70s will remember the windscreen. For a service family, those journeys were long ones… postings, leave, the endless autobahn in summer heat… and by the time you pulled into a petrol station the glass looked like a crime scene photographed in miniature. Moths, flies, small anonymous beetles, the occasional bee that had made a poor life choice. Somebody always had to get out with a sponge and a bucket of grey water, swearing gently, while the kids in the back pressed their faces to the side windows and complained about the smell of diesel. It was simply part of summer, like sunburn and warm squash.

These days I drive down from the hills here in rural Spain, through the olive groves and the almond terraces, in the height of the season, and the windscreen comes back clean. Not spotless, not quite, but clean enough that I noticed. And once you notice, you can’t stop noticing. It’s a bit like realising the clock in the hall stopped ticking months ago and you’d just assumed the silence was peace.

Scientists have a name for this, by the way. They call it the windscreen phenomenon, which sounds like a forgotten prog rock band but is in fact one of the more quietly terrifying observations of our age.

The numbers nobody reads out at six o’clock

Let’s start with what we actually know, because this is a subject where getting the numbers slightly wrong hands the whole argument to the people who’d rather we didn’t have it.

The figure that does the rounds… “nearly 80% of insects gone from parts of Europe in two decades”… is really two separate pieces of research stitched together. The first and most famous comes from a group of amateur entomologists in Krefeld, Germany, who were sensible and stubborn enough to keep setting insect traps for decades when nobody was paying them any attention. Sampling from 63 protected nature areas across Germany, researchers found that flying insect biomass had fallen by about 76 percent over 27 years. Read that again, and pay attention to the word “protected”. One of the study’s authors pointed out that these weren’t agricultural areas at all, but well-maintained nature reserves meant to safeguard biodiversity. If that’s what’s happening in the places we’ve fenced off for wildlife, you have to wonder what’s happening in the places we haven’t.

The second number comes from the UK, and from ordinary people with smartphones and slightly grubby number plates. The Bugs Matter citizen science survey, run by Kent Wildlife Trust and Buglife, recorded a 78 per cent drop in bug splats on UK number plates since 2004. England showed the steepest fall at 83%, with London worst of all at a 91% reduction. Now, to be fair to the people running it, they’re honest about the limitations. A splat count is a crude instrument, and the most recent Kent figures suggested the rate of decline had slowed, and might even flatten or reverse. I mention that not to soften anything but because I’d rather you trusted me than agreed with me.

So, the honest version is this. A 76% drop over 27 years in German nature reserves, a 78% fall over roughly two decades in a rough-and-ready British survey, and a mountain of smaller studies pointing broadly in the same direction. Not every insect, not every place, not every year. But the shape of the thing is unmistakable, and it’s been unmistakable since 2017.

Why it never gets the big slot

Here’s the problem, and it isn’t a conspiracy; it’s something far more boring and therefore far more durable. Television loves a disaster with a face. A hurricane gets a name, a flood gets aerial footage, a wildfire gets that orange glow behind a reporter in a hi-vis jacket. Extreme weather is cinematic. It arrives, it destroys, it leaves, and you can measure it in rooftops.

An insect collapse is the precise opposite. It’s an absence. You cannot film a moth that isn’t there. You cannot interview a hedgerow that’s gone quiet. There’s no single day when it happened, no before-and-after drone shot, no grieving homeowner standing in the wreckage. It happens at the pace of a slow puncture, and newsrooms are built for blowouts.

I spent enough years in the RAF Police and then in security management to know how institutions handle a slow problem. They log it. They commission a report. They agree it’s concerning. Then they wait for it to become a fast problem, at which point everyone says nobody could have seen it coming. The memo is always there, somewhere, signed and filed. It’s just that nobody ever reads it out loud.

The blame game, and the villain with no address

When the subject does break through, it tends to arrive as a tidy argument with two sides. On one bench, agricultural bodies and the chemical industry pointing at climate change. On the other, independent researchers and conservationists pointing at pesticides, particularly the neonicotinoids, and the whole architecture of industrial farming.

I’m going to annoy both sides here, because I think the tidy argument is part of the problem.

Climate is genuinely a factor. Anyone telling you otherwise hasn’t been paying attention. Research from the University of North Carolina tracked flying insects across 15 summers between 2004 and 2024 in a remote Colorado mountain meadow, an area relatively undisturbed by people, and found a 72.4% drop over the twenty years, with climate change the likely culprit. No crop sprayers, no motorways, no supermarket supply chains, and still the numbers fell off a cliff. That matters, and it should frighten us.

But notice how useful climate is as an explanation if you happen to sell pesticides. Climate has no address. It can’t be subpoenaed. It doesn’t have a sales director, quarterly targets or a lobbying budget in Brussels. Blaming the weather is the corporate equivalent of a teenager saying the window was already broken when he got there. It may even be partly true. It’s also enormously convenient.

And when you look at the knock-on effect on birds, which is where the insect story finally gets feathers and therefore a bit of attention, the evidence leans hard in one direction. A major 2023 study in PNAS examined 170 common bird species monitored at more than 20,000 sites across 28 European countries over 37 years, and found that agricultural intensification, particularly pesticide and fertiliser use, was the main pressure behind most population declines, especially among birds that feed on invertebrates. Across the study period, common European bird species fell by around a quarter, while farmland species more than halved, a drop of roughly 56.8%. The hardest hit were insect eaters like the Common Swift, Yellow Wagtail and Spotted Flycatcher.

The mechanism isn’t complicated. The researchers believe birds are mainly harmed through loss of food, since pesticides are designed to kill the very insects and invertebrates birds eat, and invertebrates matter during breeding for over 80% of the species studied. You don’t need to poison the bird. You just need to empty its larder during the weeks it’s trying to feed its chicks. Silent Spring, it turns out, wasn’t a prophecy. It was a forecast with a long lead time.

So it isn’t climate or chemicals. It’s habitat loss, chemicals, fertiliser run-off, light pollution, urban sprawl and a warming climate, all leaning on the same wobbly table at once. The difference is that only some of those legs can be sawn off by a minister next spring. You can’t legislate the jet stream. You can legislate what goes on a seed.

The neonicotinoid saga, or how to ban something while still using it

The neonics story is a masterclass in the art of saying one thing and doing another. The EU restricted them in 2013 and broadly banned outdoor use of the main three in 2018, after which member states promptly began issuing “emergency” exemptions with the regularity of a bus timetable. It took the European Court of Justice in 2023 to point out that an emergency which happens every single year isn’t really an emergency; it’s a business model.

Britain, freed from Brussels, did its own version. After leaving the EU, the Conservative government used its post-Brexit powers to grant emergency authorisations for neonics on sugar beet seed, to protect against virus yellows disease, which can cost growers half their yields. That last bit matters, and I’ll come back to it. Then in January 2025, the tune changed. The government refused the emergency application for Cruiser SB, the first time in five years one hadn’t been approved, citing clear and abundant evidence that the chemical is extremely toxic to bees, and that even non-lethal doses can impair foraging and hive productivity. The environment minister conceded that Britain is currently one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, which is the sort of sentence that ought to be carved over the door of Defra rather than tucked into a press release.

There’s more. England’s environmental watchdog, the Office for Environmental Protection, launched an investigation into whether the 2023 and 2024 authorisations involved serious failures to comply with environmental law. The Health and Safety Executive has since tightened its guidance on emergency use of banned pesticides, while campaigners still argue the loopholes need shutting for good. Meanwhile, across the Channel, the EU’s flagship plan to halve pesticide use was quietly withdrawn in early 2024, after farmers drove tractors into Brussels and politicians suddenly remembered there were elections coming.

And here’s where I’ll defend the farmers, because someone should. The sugar beet grower facing a virus that can wipe out half his crop isn’t a cartoon villain twirling his moustache over a spray tank. He’s a man squeezed between supermarket contracts, input costs, banks, weather and a public that wants cheap food and pristine hedgerows simultaneously, without ever wanting to pay for either. Industrial farming isn’t a choice individual farmers made over breakfast. It’s a system we all built, every time we picked the cheaper punnet. Blaming the bloke on the tractor is as lazy as blaming the weather. The rot is in the architecture.

The bill that comes later

So why should anyone who doesn’t keep bees or own binoculars care? Because of food, and because this is where the “quiet but massive threat” stops being a phrase and becomes a receipt.

Roughly three-quarters of the world’s leading food crop types benefit, to some degree, from animal pollination. Now, before anybody panics about bread, wheat, rice and maize are mostly wind-pollinated. We are not, in the short term, going to starve. What we lose is the colour. The fruit, the nuts, the coffee, the cocoa, the tomatoes, the almonds. I can see the almond terraces from where I’m sitting, and I know that every spring the growers round here rely on something with wings turning up for work. In parts of China, they’ve already had orchards where people climbed ladders with brushes to pollinate pear blossom by hand. That’s what the end of free labour looks like. Expensive, slow, and only affordable for some.

The real damage, though, is in the less glamorous jobs. Insects break down dung and dead things. They eat the pests that eat the crops. They feed the fish, the frogs, the bats and the birds. They aerate the soil. Remove enough of them and you don’t get one dramatic collapse, you get a thousand small failures that compound quietly into higher prices, poorer harvests, thinner nutrition and a countryside that looks green and functions like a car park.

And how is officialdom responding? I’m glad you asked. The EU’s 2026 Horizon research call on insect decline, worth €13 million, closed on 17 September, acknowledging a drop estimated around 75% over three decades and noting that, under the Nature Restoration Regulation, member states must reverse pollinator decline by 2030. So we’ve commissioned research to “better understand” a crisis we’ve understood since a group of German amateurs emptied their traps in 2017, with four years to fix it. I don’t say research is worthless. I say that at some point, understanding becomes a very sophisticated way of not doing anything.

Back at the cave

Out here, off the grid, you live closer to the small things than most people do. The solar light outside draws the moths on summer nights, and I’ll admit I’ve started counting them, which is either the beginning of citizen science or the beginning of a man talking to himself in a cave. Probably both. In spring the swifts come screaming over the village like Spitfires on a low pass, and every year I find myself standing in the lane, head back, checking they’ve all come home. I can’t tell you whether there are fewer than there used to be. I haven’t been here long enough, and memory is a terrible witness. But I know what the PNAS researchers found about swifts, and I know what they eat, and I know what’s sprayed on the groves a few kilometres down the valley.

I don’t have a neat conclusion for you. I’d love to tell you the neonic bans are working, that the insects are bouncing back, that the €13 million will crack it and the swifts will be fine. Some of that may even happen. The Kent figures hint that the freefall might be slowing. Germany has put money in. Britain has finally said no to one bottle of poison, after five years of saying yes.

But I’ve spent too long around institutions to mistake a press release for a recovery. What I do know is that the silence is real, it’s measurable, and it’s been happening at the exact volume most likely to be ignored.

So next summer, when you pull into a service station on a long drive, have a quick look at the front of your car. If the windscreen’s clean… don’t thank the rain.

#MarkhamUnfiltered

Until Next Time