Some time ago, a Sag Harbor friend said something in passing that at the time seemed remarkably apt and that has grown even more accurate. We had been standing in her driveway on Madison Street, noticing the mechanical sounds of earth moving equipment at a property around the corner. “We live in an industrial zone,” she said.
Main Street in East Hampton Village is the same way. On Tuesday, as the guys with a jackhammer at Guild Hall took a break for lunch, landscapers started in at Clinton Academy, mowing the already-short grass and blowing leaves into the gutter. Up near Huntting Lane, a village crew was cutting two diseased trees with chain saws and grinding the limbs.
What my friend meant by industrial zone, as I interpreted it, was that there was never a break from the noise. We are surrounded by the cacophony of growth and powerful human desire to change things, sometimes just for the sake of change.
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After I wrote last week about how insects have all but disappeared from outside our office and that we no longer put up the screens each spring on the windows and doors, Russell Bennett, who works downstairs, sent a link to a relevant Washington Post article. In Friday’s edition, Andrew Van Dam, who writes the newspaper’s “Department of Data” column, took a deep look into why there were so few dead bugs on vehicle windshields these days.
“Windshield splats are valid ecological data, and they don’t bear good news,” he observed.
Citing a massive study by a Danish university professor, Mr. Van Dam reported that insect splatters fell by 80 percent between 1996 and 2017 on a single stretch of road, and by a stunning 97 percent on another. A British study conducted between 2004 and 2021 found a 60-percent decline in the number of insects striking license plates.
Certainly, there are some sorts of bugs in abundance. Mosquitoes, for one, seem as thick as ever near water. Predators and garbage-pickers, such as late-summer yellow jackets, appear to be holding on. But other kinds of flying insects are fewer. We had moths around the porch light this summer, but not as many as in memory.
A quick survey of the vehicles in the Star parking lot was sobering. Jane Bimson, who drives across the Napeague stretch on her way to the office, had the most squashed bugs, three on her front license plate. Another car had one, and another a possible splat. That was it.
Talking with another co-worker this week, we racked our brains to try to remember the last time we saw a truck or car mounted with an insect shield on the hoods. No time recently, we concluded.
Something is hitting the fan, but it sure isn’t insects.