Hello, tweets.

In response to Wayne Weber's good post about Common Nighthawks, I wanted to add that the species has also declined substantially in the East, where it was a very common species until relatively recently. This is a bird that winters in the Amazon Basin, and I wonder if there might be changes going on down there that are causing a decline on the wintering grounds.

But I can also say something about the abundance of flying insects. When I was a teen-ager and college student in Miami in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I started a collection of beetles, which grew into an obsession (all collectors must suffer from OCD, or they aren't very successful). I was out night after night visiting lights in shopping centers all over southern Florida, eventually more widely in the Southeast. I gave the collection to a museum when it totalled about 25 insect boxes stuffed full of beetles. There were thousands (probably millions) of insects coming to lights everywhere I went, from the tropical hammocks of the Keys to the edge of the Everglades to the cypress swamps of north Florida. Anywhere I went, the sky was full of flying insects around porch lights, street lights, and the high, bright lights at shopping centers, parking lots, and freeways. These weren't all microscopic; they included huge moths, giant water bugs, two-inch long-horned beetles, al!
l kinds
of charismatic compound-eyed megainvertebrates.

In the same areas under the same circumstances now there are NO INSECTS (statistically speaking). I have visited all parts of the Southeast over the last three springs and summers. You can look up in the sky at night around the lights at a shopping center anywhere now and see no more than a desultory moth or two flying around the light, even when you are right next to large tracts of pristine habitats. You can look outside your motel room at the light on the wall in vain, even though a nice stand of woods is right behind your motel. I used to find insects of all kinds at these lights, often in sufficient numbers that getting into your room without bringing in a whole heap of bugs was difficult.

I don't think the reason is because the lights have changed in wave length or attractiveness, although I would be open to hearing that argument. An exception to this was at Glenwood, Arkansas, this summer, where there were quite a few insects at lights (this was at an entomological meeting, and everyone at the motel was out late at night and early in the morning photographing insects at each others' porch lights!), so I suspect their absence in other areas is a real phenomenon. We all felt the hills of Arkansas were remarkably rich in habitats and biodiversity, and parenthetically, that would be a great state in which to live, even in the absence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers!

Obviously insects aren't absent from the Southeast and Northwest, as there are still plenty of lizards, birds, bats, dragonflies, etc., in all these areas that feed primarily on insects. But perhaps they are all less common now! The change, as indicated by insects coming to lights, has been dramatic and at least should be considered when noting the decline of birds such as nighthawks.

This phenomenon has to be one of the most profound environmental changes that has occurred in my lifetime, yet it has scarcely been mentioned in the environmental literature. It should be front-page news. Silent Spring should be rewritten as Empty Nights. Those of you who have lived in the Northwest all your lives have no idea how abundant insects can be (or have been) in the East and thus the degree of change that has taken place. If it has happened here, it hasn't been obvious to me, just because I never saw that many insects at lights to begin with when I arrived here 36 years ago. Some of you may not know that the Pacific Northwest (westside) is the poorest place in the Lower 48 for insects - probably why so many people like it here!

Documenting such changes, at least anecdotally if not quantitatively, is one of the reasons why we should keep naturalists around into their old age!

Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 ST.
Seattle, WA 98115
dennispaulson at comcast.net