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Comment by alobat72 | Hacker News Reader

I just know : my mom has a garden and in winter she used to feed the birds. Since 2 or 3 years the birds are not stopping eating this food when spring comes - my mom now feeds the birds all year. At the same time insect have become noticeably fewer

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Your comment and this article are the first I noticed mentioning the birds as a second indicator. It means the cascade has started. Somewhere else, it's probably already acting as well: the soil, the plants, or stuff we don't know about.

I noticed last year and this year again when i drove ~800 km to a vacation. 10-20 years ago i had to wipe loads of sticky insect parts of my windshield. Not necessary anymore. I'd guess back then my windshield whould have caught ~200 bugs/hour and now it's more like ~10. So my highly subjective statistic says: insects are fucked and maybe so are we.

Maybe your modern car windshield glass is less sticky. Maybe your modern car aerodynamics is better and insects just fly around.

The problem may or may not exist, but your subjective statistic tells nothing.

There's plenty of proof it's true if you bothered to look. Here's but one example:

https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/blogs/why-are-fire...

https://www.firefly.org/why-are-fireflies-disappearing.html

Something which I've also anecdotally noticed long before I researched it to confirm it's not my imagination. You can see it in action at my cousin's farm. Their prairie is a hive of activity and lights at night. The neighboring soy farm is dead.

As I said, it might be true. I personally believe it's true.

But the argument about windshield proves nothing.

If I say "don't open the door, there is a dangerous thing behind it, I saw it". Will you open the door or trust anecdotal evidence ?

The thing is, we need balance between facebook mum faith and requesting studies, numbers and white papers for every single little opinion.

I noticed fewer bugs on my windshield and called it _highly subjective_ statistics, already implying it proves nothing.

By coincidence I drive the same car as my mother did back then. And the same route. I will call it a standardized test then and wait for further peer review.

A hundred cars, helmets and various transparent windows accross 20 years of a travel life, cross referenced with your friends and family experienced may not be scientific. Hell it may not be a representative sample.

But it's a damn good hint.

I don't remember much more insects 10 years ago.

(Actually, I don't remember, because I moved from the countryside to the city centre, and rarely visit countryside, but that's the point).

But I remember that the number of insects varies significantly depending on how much rain was that year, how far is the forest, how hot it is, and even what time of day it was what I was spent time outside.

I don't know, maybe it's very local climate change in your town, because the forest was replaced with high-rise buildings. Maybe you and your friends grew older and started waking up later/earlier.

So, no, random people on the internet opinions are interesting but do not contribute anything significant to the climate discussion.

And these personal experiences only give more confidence and more arguments to climate change deniers.

Unlike pointers to scientific research.

As lightgreen pointed out this anecdote doesn't mean anything alone. Many things could have shifted bug populations to other areas or changed their season.

As a counter anecdote my vehicle is covered in bugs. I should probably power wash my radiator.

Yes, this is a thing that I noticed, less bugs, less birds. In summer at 5am it used to be a real concert in my garden to the point that you got a natural alarm clock. Now? With my window open, there is quite quiet, an occasional bird song every 2-3 mins.

And yes, I live in Germany. It is alarming, and I fear the worst, a real threat to the ecology cycle.

"Bird populations in steep decline in North America, study finds"

> North America has more than a billion fewer birds than it did 40 years ago

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/report-fi...

And then, "Lyme and Other Tickborne Diseases Increasing"

https://www.cdc.gov/media/dpk/diseases-and-conditions/lyme-d...

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