Back when I was doing my Zoology degree in the 1960s I was reading books like Rachel Carson – Silent Spring and Gordon Rattray Taylor – The Biological Timebomb and the Doomsday Book. Population, Pollution and ecological catastrophe were big themes to grapple with.

I had grown up with nature, romped in fields full of buzz, stridulation, colour and life. I caught lizards, newts, frogs, toads and snakes. The ditches were alive with living creatures. The air was full of wings, feathered and chitinous and my ears were full of birdsong and chirping, buzzing melody. My eyes took the colours for granted.

I suppose I thought it would always be like that. That Rachel and Gordon’s warnings would be heeded.

My fear was that the overnight destruction of the richness of nature would shock people into action.

But it isn’t like that.

As the population has increased it has steadily encroached. The ditches were culvetted, the hedgerows scratted up. The monocultures were sprayed with herbicide and the flowers withered. The fields were sprayed with pesticide and the insects declined. The creatures that fed on insects starved or were poisoned.

Gradually, foot by foot, nature was reduced, increment by increment. No more shrews or voles, no visiting hedgehogs, no swifts shrieking in delight as they screamed through the air feeding on the flying insects. No house-martins and swifts to skim across the fields and streams.

Little by little it is being eaten away – slowly – so that nobody even notices.

There were two swifts this afternoon where there would have been fifty. No swallows where there were a dozen. No house-martins nesting in the eaves.

There are no splodges on my windscreen. No need to clean the headlights.

No colour in the meadow. No buzz in the ear.

It makes me want to cry.