Wild Side: Superlative bugging

I spent the middle of June on a long-anticipated trip to France, visiting briefly in Burgundy, longer near the southern city of Avignon, and then briefly again in Paris before returning home. This was mainly a social and cultural trip with my wife, visiting friends, museums, and historical sites. But naturally I managed some time for naturalizing, and also naturally, I found myself viewing the places I visited through the lens of Vineyard ecology.

If there was one overall impression left by my bug-searching in France, it’s that the numbers and diversity of insects in the French countryside can be remarkable, even under conditions that you might think would make insects scarce. To be sure, my few field observations are far too meager to support meaningful generalizations about a roughly quarter-million-square-mile country. But where I went, I found bugs galore. 

My first such impression came on our first day in France, driving a sleek rented Peugeot to a tiny village in Burgundy. The landscape on the way was flat, dry, agricultural (with mostly wheat and barley growing), and sparsely populated; it resembled parts of the American Midwest. I experienced something I haven’t seen for many decades: a windshield densely spattered with squashed insects. 

The absence of such incidental slaughter has often been cited as anecdotal evidence for the “insect apocalypse”; their populations reduced dramatically from historical levels, flying insects simply often aren’t common enough anymore to encounter windshields in significant numbers. But for whatever reason, on this drive, the good old days were back again.

Once in Burgundy, sadly just for a single night, I photographed bugs on flowers, mostly lavender and elderberry, on a roadside adjacent to a famous vineyard. The experience was remarkable: The flowers attracted mobs of butterflies, bees, wasps, and beetles, while a half-dozen species of grasshoppers and crickets were thick in the grass below. This was just a site picked at random, yet its productivity exceeded all but my best moments of Massachusetts bug-hunting.

In Avignon, my attention turned to a habitat known locally as “Garrigue” (pronounced something like “ga-REEG-ga,” with a guttural, Gallic roll to the “R”). The term refers to arid, thin-soiled areas on the steep limestone hills that rise above plains and valleys of Provence. Droughty and fire-prone, Garrigue reminded me somewhat of the Vineyard’s sandplain. Both sites are harsh, dry environments dominated by scrubby oaks (with small, tough leaves, in the case of the French habitat) and drought-resistant grasses and wildflowers. Many of our familiar culinary herbs, notably thyme, grow wild and abundantly in the Garrigue.

Even in June, this habitat was hot and dry, with most of the vegetation desiccated. But the bugs? Holy cow! Undeterred by the dryness, a wealth of bees and butterflies flocked to the few flowers that were in bloom, while grasshoppers and bush-crickets abounded in the low grass and even on bare soil. Despite the conditions, this was superlative bugging. As soon as I finished photographing one subject, another was available, seemingly walking or flying right into my sights. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such numbers.

Again, my point is certainly not that insect populations in France are doing just fine. I doubt they are, overall. But in certain areas that I was lucky enough to visit, local populations were simply unbelievable relative to Southern New England standards. I have two hypotheses to explain this, neither of which feels particularly compelling or has any real evidence to support it.

But the French are notoriously proud of their wine and cuisine, and this pride may extend to being very careful about what chemicals end up in food as it’s being produced. So perhaps agrarian portions of France are simply less toxic than portions of the U.S. that I’m familiar with, sustaining higher insect numbers and greater diversity.

Or perhaps, patterns of land use in portions of France have remained stable for very long periods of time, allowing a productive, half-natural, half-artificial ecosystem to evolve. Those Burgundy vineyards, for example, may well have been producing grapes since Roman times, with land unsuitable for grapes left largely on its own. And certainly the Garrigue, hostile and inaccessible, must have trundled on essentially unchanged since before there was human culture.

In contrast, consider Martha’s Vineyard, where a complete cycle of deforestation and reforestation, followed by exploding development, has all taken place within little more than a couple of centuries. Our diversity is high here, but I expect it would be higher if nature had had a longer time to respond to the changes humans have wrought.

In any case, the abundance and diversity I found were as enjoyable as they were surprising. And the experience of exploring new areas and habitats was, as it invariably is, incredibly rewarding. But as always, I find myself with a little knowledge gained, dwarfed by a pile of unanswered questions.