HAVE you found yourself wondering where all the butterflies in your garden have gone this summer?

Or noticed that kamikaze moths are no longer hurling themselves in their hundreds at your outside lights?

I’ve been muttering about it to my husband for weeks.

We don’t use any sprays or chemicals, and we’ve planted loads of shrubs and flowers chosen to be attractive to insects.

We leave a patch of nettles for caterpillars and lots of ivy (very popular with bees, hoverflies and nesting birds) to flourish, and we back on to a river and open fields.

What’s not to like if you’re a bug? Yet there were certainly far more of them around last year.

So I was interested to read an article by The Observer’s science editor Robin McKie on Sunday entitled ‘Where Have All Our Insects Gone?’ (Google it on the Guardian website). It spelled out just how worried wildlife experts are by what some are calling an “insect Armageddon”.

A recent tweet from Chris Packham was quoted: “Our generation is presiding over an ecological apocalypse.”

I’ve mentioned the loss of the Nadder’s coots before. Now I come to think of it, it’s years since we saw a spotted flycatcher hunting over the water.

Since the 1970s their numbers have plummeted by 95 per cent. Of course, if there is no flying fodder for them, bird populations will suffer. And the knock-on effect will continue up the food chain. In effect, said the article, insects are “the little things that run the world”.

It blamed “a multiple whammy of environmental impacts” - pollution, habitat changes through intensive farming and urban spread, pesticides and global warming.

All of which explains why we should support the latest plea from Salisbury Area Greenspace Partnership for a joined-up network of dedicated routes or ‘greenways’ for pedestrians and cyclists around our city and its outskirts, which would form invaluable wildlife corridors.

They are also urging the council to designate the high points of our surrounding downland and key areas of our river valleys as country parks or reserves, protecting important landscapes and wildlife havens from development.

City councillors have taken on board their greenways idea and included it with their own response to Wiltshire’s half-hearted Salisbury Transport Strategy.

Greenspace campaigner Nicola Lipscombe says one of the biggest problems locally is the lack of a forum for joint working between the various parishes and area boards that the old Salisbury District has been split into, quite deliberately, by Wiltshire.

She must be right. We humans are moving across these invisible borders all the time, and so are our wild creatures.

It’s bonkers to pretend we don’t need to address this problem urgently. We have people across the south of the county with an informed interest in these matters who are eager to help create such a web of green routes.

Only Wiltshire has the clout to make it happen. Does it have the political will?

anneriddle36@gmail.com