Where Have Nantucket's Bugs Gone?

To the editor: Summer 2024 has come and gone, and for the first time ever, I have not seen even one single ladybug. Since we came to live in this house in the mid-1990s, there has been a precipitous fall-off in wildlife with the exception of rabbits and deer. To begin with, tiny frogs would sometimes appear in the throats of daylilies. Once while weeding a flowerbed, I came across a ring-necked snake. Warwick Broom and lavender were abuzz with bees, while cilantro and prickly-pear cactus in containers attracted little emerald green and gold flies. We had honeybees in one wall, and there were burrowing wasps in the yard. Praying mantises, stick insects, and lace wings clung to window screens. There were butterflies of many varieties: Monarchs, Painted Ladies, Red Admirals, Swallowtails, and little Skippers. There was a great variety of backyard birds, some nesting just out back.

Most of the insects have disappeared. I don’t miss the mosquitoes and yellow jackets, but I do miss the others. Our three grape vines used to produce almost too much fruit, but now they hardly set any grapes at all. Are their pollinators among the missing? Cardinals, chickadees, blue jays, Carolina wrens, and song sparrows are still here, but the hummingbirds haven’t been back for two years. Not one Rose-breasted Grosbeak showed up this spring. The lines of holes the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker used to punch in my holly tree have dried up. There used to be a flock of Goldfinches, but now they show up in ones and twos. What I have these days is an abundance of Grackles and Mourning Doves. I grow a stand of Common Milkweed every summer, and now and then a Monarch flutters by. Two showed up at the milkweed the other day. I wish there were more.

I long ago took the Cornell Ornithology Lab’s Messy Gardener pledge to let plants go to seed for seed-eating birds and to leave leaf litter over the winter to harbor insects for insect-eating birds. But where have the birds and butterflies and bees gone? I do not spray anything on my property, but I have begun to wonder whether my neighbors on all sides do. There was an ad the other day with a special offer for the first Nantucket families to sign up. It offered spraying against disease-bearing insects. It’s the same logic that led to digging mosquito ditches and filling in Nantucket wetlands during the Depression years. The fear then was of mosquito-borne malaria and yellow fever. With Eastern Equine Encephalitis and West Nile Virus currently threatening, and tick-borne diseases endemic, the attraction of this kind of service is obvious, but at what cost to Nantucket’s ecosystems?

Frances Karttunen