Kent Wildlife Trust swarms with AWS tech to splat insect decline

For many of us growing up in the 1980s in the south of England, summer holidays meant piling in the car and making the long road trip down to Devon or Cornwall for a week or two at the seaside. Aside from arguing with your siblings or playing eye spy, the most exciting part of the journey was watching the windscreen get grubbier as dozens of insects splatted against the glass at high speed.

I’m now left wondering whether I imagined the whole thing in some childish daydream, as my car windscreen is now remarkably clean at the end of a long summer journey. It transpires that it’s not just me: ‘windscreen phenomenon’ is actually a thing – it’s the observation that fewer dead insects now meet their end on cars, and it’s one backed up by some worrying statistics. Across the UK, the number of flying ...