The photograph on the right is of an insect relaxing on the wall of our recently rented overnight chalet in a Free State nature reserve. It was an exquisitely peaceful creature, with transparent wings like a dragonfly but had the form of a very large moth when it opened them.
It’s now late on Saturday night. I’m sitting on the porch of my Johannesburg home and thrilling to the music of crickets around our garden.
In some dark moments, I have imagined our world completely free of insects. Not one. Anywhere.
Sadness wells up. It’s a vast void in the ocean of bio-diverse life on our Mother planet.
Yet how easily we judge insects as intruders, as menaces, as something to be “Doom(TM)”ed out of existence. Wouldn’t you agree? the consensus (un)consciousness is fearfully pervasive! Yet – admittedly a lay observer, and while acknowledging the undesirability of sustaining a toxic spider’s bite or malaria transmitted to my blood stream by a hungry anopheles mosquito – I can’t imagine that more than a hundredth of a percent of the planet’s insect population is in any way detrimental to our lives.
On the contrary. I’m sitting on the porch of my Johannesburg home, and thrilling to the music of crickets around our garden.
We recently experienced a two week camping vacation in early January at the Tsitsikamma national park. This area is a vortex of natural intensity, indigenous forest, and a protected marine reserve where schools of dolphins often dance by only fifty metres from where our tent is pitched above the rocks where the waves’ rhythmic splashing is almost incessant and is the music we fall asleep with. It took me a few days to realize that there is currently almost no insect population and it distressed me. How can that possibly be a sign of a healthy environment?
When insects are present, then so are birds. When insects and birds are present, then the indigenous forest takes on a new vitality and there is a thriving ecology.
This time there were also fewer birds at Tsitsikamma than I fondly remember hearing and seeing in years gone by.
Our Earth Mother is valiantly trying to sustain her Song. But she seems to be gasping for breath.
I thank G-d for the music of the crickets in my garden. I’m moved to join the symphony by strumming softly on my guitar and singing the melody in my heart. As I do, the crickets seem to come more alive.
(Top) A juvenile kelp gull squeals for its mother.
(Below) A view from near our Tsitsikamma tent-site, looking eastward towards the sun rising over the ocean.
#music #birds #motherearth #nature #insectpopulation #ecology
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