Mention “ wildlife ,” and most people conjure up images of charismatic megafauna like lions and tigers and bears ( Oh my !). But wildlife is far more than the few large mammal species that adorned our childhood picture books . The vast majority of earth ’ s animal species are insects , and we can ’ t live without them . As E . O . Wilson has famously explained , insects are the little things that run the world . Without insect pollinators , 80 percent of all plants and 90 percent of all flowering plants would disappear , as would the food webs that support mammals , reptiles , amphibians , birds , and freshwater fishes . Wilson ’ s message was clear : there will be no lions , tigers , or bears ; birds , bats , or bunnies ; humans , or other animals in a world without insects .
Despite this knowledge , we have waged war on many insects and ignored the basic needs of the rest for so long that now most insects are in trouble . Insects are not the only important forms of wildlife , but nearly all more charismatic wildlife depends on them . We cannot reverse wildlife losses without reversing insect declines .
For the past four years , I have been photographing the moth species that live on our property . This year I reached
1,020 species . That ’ s right : at least 1,020 ( and counting ) moth species make their living on our 10-acre patch of southeastern Pennsylvania . That is 40 percent of all of the moth species that have been recorded in the 2.4 million acres that comprise Pennsylvania — 40 percent on just 1 / 240,000th of the land area !
And because each of those moths and the caterpillars they developed from are essential “ bird food ,” 59 species of birds have been able to breed on our property , a full 38 percent of all the terrestrial birds that breed in Pennsylvania . Who knows how many additional bird species have used our land as a refueling site during fall and spring migration ?
Our property is not a preserve that has been protected for a century — just the opposite . Not long ago , it was part of a small farm whose successive owners had worked the land hard for 300 years . Before we moved in , the vegetation was a tangle of invasive Asian plants that the owners had mowed and called “ hay .” Very few trees and no native shrubs grew here , and most of the birds introduced were starlings and house sparrows that could thrive on exhausted farmland . The caterpillars that sustain 96 percent of North American terrestrial bird species were largely absent .
Clockwise from upper-left : Bluebird ; spiny oak slug ; spiny roase slug ; silvery prominent white-eyed vireo .
WINTER / SPRING 2021 • VOLUME 43
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