Branching away from, but certainly connected to the climate change debate, is the fairly obvious die-off of the bottom of the food chain. I only recently realised Arthur Firstenberg has a SubStack, and this is his most recent post:
Anecdotally, I was talking to a friend a while back who remarked upon how a trip he had recently taken to Northumberland had made him realise how much less “bug splatter” there is on car windscreens and front fenders. He had to use the windscreen wipers a lot while travelling around the county. This used to be the case everywhere he said.
I noticed quite a lot more bugs (including ticks) in Devon last year but way more in Northumberland, from about the Tyne Tunnel onward. Nothing much in Cumbria, Yorkshire, County Durham. In the South East not much at all, even ants seem less numerous.
Northumbria generally (by this I mean the old Kingdom, extending up into the Borders) is agriculturally very rich and that’s probably a major factor.