Bog Myrtle & Peat

When rain came after many dry weeks, life exploded. For three nights, toads crowded onto the roads and made it impossible to drive a car. Walking with a torch along the quarter mile loaning to my house, I counted four hundred and seventy toads in the puddles and the wet grass around me. When I got home, I failed to spot that one had volunteered to explore the inside corner of the door’s open hinge. He met with a crunching finale.

The following night when I was out for a fox, the fields were glistening with slugs which lay in the wet grass like an explosion of liquorice allsorts. Some of these were monstrous things, seven inches long and honey-coloured or swathed in leopard spots. I struggled to avoid them, and found myself dancing hopscotch through the fields in trails of silver slime.

Then after the rain, sunlight summoned up a hatch of craneflies which flew in blizzards against the house. They filled my boots and my hair, and walking down to check the cattle in the afternoon sun, I watched them rise like thistledown before me; backlit gales of insect life which seemed to churn and boil in the grass. They filled every concave surface, and so many drowned in a bucket left out for the pigs that I could not see the water. I scooped them out with a brush, leaving an angular, knock-kneed scum on the yard slabs.

I used to call them daddy-long-legs, but I actually prefer craneflies now. Perhaps it’s a more serious name, and it certainly covers a whole family of similar but subtly different species. But I also say they’re craneflies because I like the association with gangly birds, and even heavy-lifting equipment, with all its height and clumsy cablework trailing madly in the wind. For me, the word implies angularity, awkwardness and twisted length, and in local Galloway Scots (which has a famously incoherent approach to vowel sounds), the word crane is often rendered cran, ie, to rhyme with man. So that’s how I think of them now; the hills were glittering wi cranflees.

There’s nothing unexpected about toads, slugs or craneflies. You might call these creatures “run of the mill”, but it’s becoming unusual to find them in such extraordinary numbers. If they’re commonplace as individuals, sheer numbers make them special. At a moment in the year traditionally associated with harvest, it’s humbling to witness the summer’s crop of insects rising like a blizzard of seeds from the soil. It’s no wonder that the local bats are sleek and fat as seals.

We’re used to using biodiversity as a measure of natural health. It’s helpful, but it doesn’t capture any sense of abundance associated with seasonal booms and bust. I’ve heard that toads and slugs are failing in the south of England, and insects are collapsing wherever you look. That’s worrying, because while some species are well suited to modern conservation techniques, smaller things respond to conditions beyond our control. If it came to a choice, I’d rather be faced with the decline of simple species like eagles or beavers; creatures you can count and care for. It’s certainly possible to provide or protect habitats for slugs or toads, but they lie just slightly beyond human spheres of influence. We cannot neatly curate them; they dance to tune of grand atmospherics and weather systems which are spawned far out in the North Atlantic. In that sense, there’s something unmanageably vast about small things which otherwise seem modest or quotidian.

Becoming aware of national declines, I’m grateful for these plagues at home – but I can’t enjoy them as a fact of life or take them for granted. Next year, I’ll find myself counting the toads again, fearing that I’ll end up with a smaller number, and knowing that here’s where the bigger problem lies.