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Thu, 21 Jan 2021 21:34:02 +0000 |
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I think trying to blame loss of insects on single causes is likely not very accurate. Different insects occupy different habitats and have different requirements, even on a very local basis. Take the Monarch butterfly as an example. They depend 100% on milkweeds to reproduce. No milkweeds no reproduction. Milkweeds do not stand cultivation at all well. In fact they are pretty hard to keep alive if you dig them up and transplant. The net result is they are a fence row and ditch weed nearly exclusively. In much of the Monarch territory there has not been all that much of a change in fence rows over the last 75 years. Perhaps reduced by 50%. In some cases they even may be wider due to the bigger equipment used by farmers these days. They were never very wide. The farmer wanted to grow as close to the fence as he could to maximize crop land, so 3 feet wide or less was always common where I lived as a kid. Plus, my memory of fence rows is they were mainly grasses and not a lot of broad leafed stuff.
But what has changed in a major way is local governments mowing ditches and even spraying them for broad leafed weeds and brush control. When I was a kid no one did anything about ditches. There were a ton of milkweeds in them. And, they were a lot wider than a fence row. More like 10 feet wide. They also had a better diversity of weeds as the bottoms were a wetter environment than the tops. Today in the same place those ditches are closer to turf than a diverse weedy environment. The Monarchs have lost the ditches as habitat. The ditches where I currently live in Ohio are mowed twice a year. They should be mowed once in five or so years in very early spring in my opinion. The real story is you have to have summer stuff for the road crew to do to keep them busy so they are still around in winter when you need them to plow snow I think.
Dick
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