Michael Viney: Our flying friends and foe do not seem as plentiful as before

The thunderstorm was banging bass drums beyond the mountain and shading the evening into dusk. I was closing the gate when the slightest tickle on my wrist, where my ageing veins are bluest, gave me a split-second of alert.

I swiped the cleg from my skin. “You little bugger!” I winced, “What are you trying to prove?”

For those of urban culture, the cleg, Haemotopata pluvialis, is a slow-flying, speckled, silent fly, named kleggi by the Vikings, that alights on the skin with extreme gentleness before piercing it to suck blood.

Its malevolence once impressed the seasoned field naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger. He knelt down, thirsty and sweating from a mountain hike, to drink water in a Co Carlow meadow. "Each time I stooped," he wrote, "they descended on my head in such numbers that I gave up and fairly ran for it."

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In my time I too have fled from ambush by a buzz-less horde. But this is now, the Anthropocene, when clegs, for all I know, are reduced to lone marauders. These are, of course, females, seeking a mammalian blood-meal as part of developing their eggs. Perhaps this was what my cleg was trying to prove – a bid for her species when so many other insects have vanished from the world.

They can seem, indeed, to be vanishing from Thallabawn, along with the swallows that needed them for food. We’re not alone, I know, in lacking both masses of midges and our regular swallows: friends up the coast have the same regrets, about the birds at least. But there are, of course, plenty of people with opposite stories to tell.

Take summer moths, for example. When holidaying friends from Belfast arrive here in Mayo, they once needed to wipe the windscreen clean of dead moths and other insects gathered on the way. Now, in a well-worn signal of extinction, the wind has been swept too clean.

Furry moths

In the recent heatwave we left every window open at night to trap the slightest breeze, inviting all sorts of winged invasion. Nothing came in. Was it childhood we remembered for the big, furry moths that butted the lampshades?

Yet over in Co Kildare there's Jesmond Harding, a veteran lepidopterist, writing his July post for Butterfly Conservation: "The warmth has resulted in such an explosion of moth numbers at my moth trap that bats have appeared to snap up the ones fluttering at roof height and below. A wren entered my house looking for moths that entered when the windows were left open at night."

He does, on the other hand, suggest that while “heat is very beneficial for many adult butterflies . . . they retreat to cover during extreme heat to avoid overheating and death”. Does this explain why, in my daily straw-hatted vigil at our hedgerow buddleia, during the recent inferno the so-called “butterfly bush” and its dozens of fragrant flower spikes failed to attract anything more than a scatter of minor flies?

Wild briars, too, rampant everywhere in our garden, had inviting white flowers for months but nothing came seeking their nectar. A mass of cranesbill geranium, pinkly-flowered from June, had nothing to engage my close-up binoculars, made to focus down to half a metre.

A soft buzz from the white bells of a hosta announced one dark and furry little solitary bee, with a tiny, striped hoverfly nearby. And, yes, there are a few butterflies – some aimless large whites flapping up and down below the trees and one or two speckled woods in their usual, manic dashes back and forth.

Survey work

There were once such beauties; red admirals, peacocks, lesser tortoiseshells, painted ladies. There are probably readers in Dalkey, their gardens stuffed with the right sort of flowers, who can boast of them all.

Don’t bother writing, or not to me. This is the final year of survey work for the Butterfly Atlas, attempting definitive maps of species distribution and the changes of recent years. The latest issue of Biodiversity Ireland magazine (viewable online) speaks of more than 250,000 butterfly records on maps, but gaps remain in parts of the country, such as mid-Munster and north Mayo.

The unsurprising butterfly decline averages out at less than 1 per cent each year since 2008, but that masks bigger falls, such as almost half the green-veined white. Who knows why? The “big winner” in 2020 was the lovely, lesser tortoiseshell, showing a 6 per cent year-on-year increase.

This lovely creature, for some reason, likes to hibernate in folds of people’s curtains. Could it be that lockdowns uncovered more of them, reported at once to biodiversityireland.ie?