The Birds that Used to Be Here

There used to be more birds in my garden.

I did not notice at the time. Birds are like old friends. They are the background of your life, and you do not count them, and then one day you realise you have not seen one of them for a long time.

The swallows, which came every summer when I was a child, have not come for four years. The hedgehog that used to visit the compost has not visited in ten. The cuckoo, which I remember hearing every spring, I have not heard in twenty.

This is not my imagination. The scientists who count these things say the numbers are measurable. In many places, the insects that used to hit your windscreen on a summer drive have gone. The songbirds have thinned. The specific beetles and moths and butterflies of my childhood are, in many of the places I knew, no longer there.

I do not know exactly why. Neither do the scientists, fully. Pesticides are part of it. Habitat loss is part of it. The way farming has changed is part of it. Climate is part of it. Each part is itself complicated.

What we know is the shape. Quieter skies. Quieter hedges. Quieter summers. Fewer of the small living things that used to fill the background of an ordinary life.

I mention this because it is one of the losses we have talked about least. The other pressures get arguments. The climate gets arguments. The politics gets arguments.

The disappearance of ordinary living things from ordinary places does not get arguments. It gets a quiet sadness from people who remember, and no notice at all from people who did not see what there was to lose.

My niece, when she walks in the countryside, does not miss what is not there. She cannot. She did not meet it. She takes for granted that the fields are quieter than they used to be.

Somewhere in the future, one hopes, somebody will miss what we did not miss. Somebody will say: there used to be songbirds. There used to be insects. There used to be hedgehogs. And they will mean: there used to be a whole living texture of the world that my grandparents let go.

I do not know what to do about this. But I wanted to name it. Not everything important is political. Some of the worst losses are the ones nobody is fighting about, because nobody is quite sure what fight to have.