Splat!
Something hit the windscreen. Something large. One of those ones you REALLY notice.
And another.
The wipers tried their best but a misty smear nonetheless formed in their wake across the whole of the windscreen. It was only then that I noticed just how many smaller, soundless collisions there had been during my drive down the A90.
On arriving in Fife, I exclaimed aloud when I saw that the front of my white car wasn’t white anymore. Anyone who drives will be accustomed to this happening, but I genuinely couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen the car in such a state after just one journey.
The next day I drove to Dunblane and the same thing happened. Two days after that I was passenger in another car, driving around Stirling and the Trossachs, and I was taken aback at a) how dirty the windscreen was, and b) how easily defeated its wipers were.
Was it just me? Was this localised to wherever I was driving in East and Central Scotland? Time for one of my famously unscientific social media polls to shed some light on the matter. I asked:
Insect splat on your cars this spring. Have you found it:
- Same as normal?
- Less than normal?
- More than normal?
If you could say what part of the country you’re in that would be helpful too. THANKS!
The response was fantastic – 320 people from across the UK, 92% of whom said there was more splat than normal. Of the 250 responses from Scotland, 98% said there was more splat than normal. That’s way more than I was expecting, and the enthusiasm with which people responded also took me aback:
More than normal, have commented to others! In Fife.
More. Glasgow. I have had many people around say the same.
More than normal, and several others in my area (Huntly, Aberdeenshire) have been saying the same.
This year’s splats were clearly so unusual that people had been remarking about it to one another. And for a great many people, it wasn’t just a little bit more splat. It was a LOT more splat. And it appeared to be the same Scotland-wide.
Way more than usual (New Galloway)
Definitely more than normal. Constantly cleaning the windscreens of our community transport vehicles (Perthshire)
I’m a lorry driver and it was definitely heavier than usual in most areas.
Fife, and my car looks like a bug apocalypse has taken place!
More than normal. Travel A92 to Dundee regularly, and A9 plenty. Got a new sponge for cleaning the window!
More than normal. I am surprised at just how much. I am West Lothian.
Had to buy screen cleaner a couple of weeks ago – windscreen was plastered in bugs but washers/wipers wouldn’t take it off.
Definitely more than normal, Hampshire to Inverness, so bad we actually got the car washed in Inverness for once.
Motorcycle front screen amassed in 2 days what it took all of 2024 to do. Probably only felt compelled to clean car once a year in recent years.
Visiting in Scotland mainly Perthshire and the Borders. Have never encountered this situation previously. Thought I was back home in Oz.
Having to wash windscreens by hand to get them cleared (Aberdeenshire).
Had a long run from Aberdeenshire to the North West and back. Lost count of the amount of times I cleaned visor. More bugs everywhere
And it’s not just road drivers who have noticed:
Far far more than normal. You should also see the nick of my trains after a journey between Edinburgh and Aberdeen.
And even the much slower human traffic has noticed something in the air:
Swallowing a lot more bugs than normal while running and cycling (Edinburgh)
What interested me about the responses though, was that I was gaining insight into when people thought they’d last seen this much splatter on their cars, which in turn revealed how long a period of relative insect drought they’d experienced.
Some people compared it to the immediate past i.e. the last few years:
Perthshire but recently drove to Swindon. Much more than previous 2 to 3 years for this time of year.
Just spent a week in the Cairngorms – far more splats than I’ve seen in recent years!
More this year than the last few years and way more than last year.
Many though, were confident in citing even longer timescales:
For the first time in at least 5 years there are bugs on my windscreen (Central Scotland)
More than there has been the last decade (Highlands)
Been up here for 13 years and highest in memory (North Fife)
Not seen that mess on my vehicle in 20 years! (Moray)
But while all the people who submitted those responses had seen this kind of thing before, for some it was a completely new experience:
We were down travelling to Scarborough and the whole front of the car was covered in dead flies. Never had that before. The screen wash was not helping to see out the windscreen. Had to stop and get them washed off at the car wash.
Fife to West Lothian a couple weeks ago and never seen so many in all my years driving.
This glut wasn’t the experience for everyone, though. Five people had experienced less splat than normal, and you can well imagine how baffling the other survey responses must have seemed to them:
So surprised by these answers. I hardly see any bug strikes between Fife & Glencoe
Some admitted they had observed more splats, but explained it away in terms of lack of rain or infrequency of car cleaning:
Seems like more than usual in Fife, and visited North Uist in April, but we’ve had less rain, and I haven’t made any attempt to wash the car either.
I’m not sure if it’s more splats or less rain to wash them off.
In the Highlands – more than normal but it’s because it’s been so dry so the dead midges haven’t been washed off by the rain.
These were the exception, however, as there was otherwise a clear consensus that a) there has been a lot of splat this year, and b) that it’s been the most for some time.
‘Much more. I wash the car every 2 weeks and do up to 1000 miles a week’
But is it really a lot? Or does it just seem a lot because the last few years have been so poor for insects? Some people explicitly drew attention to this:
More than last year I’d say, but that’s up from a very low baseline of very little in preceding few years (Fife).
Definitely more than normal – the past couple of years have been the opposite with very little insect splat (Borders)
Over the last two years we noticed that there was hardly any insects on the front of the car. We were in Braemar last week, every car we walked past was covered in them!
Clearly, when a baseline is so low, anything above it looks like an improvement. But even an improvement can still be low, overall. This is why many people acknowledged that, yes, splats are significantly higher this year, but were quick to point out they’re still not a patch on years ago:
Noticeably more this year but not at the levels it used to be years ago. (Borders)
More than normal for recent years in Scotland, but still way down on 20 odd years ago.
More than usual for recent years. Still less than it used to be decades ago (Perthshire)
More than recent years but not back to 20 years ago (Argyll & Bute).
More than the last three or four years at this time of year ….Hardly any though compared to when I started driving in the mid 80’s, when I had to clean off the bug splatter weekly (Clackmannanshire)
More than normal in N Lanarkshire but still nowhere near what it used to be
More than last year, less than 20 years ago (imho). Aberdeenshire.
However, while many agreed insect levels were much higher decades ago, opinion differed on whether this year comes remotely close:
The best insect year since the 1970s (Kinross-shire)
On drive through highlands to England a week ago, I was astounded by the amount of insect splatter. Back to how it used to be when I was a kid.
Lakes. Much more than recent years. More like it was 50 yrs ago
Much more than normal, Almost back to the 80’s (Isle of Mull).
At this point you should be asking, what exactly IS normal anyway? I deliberately didn’t clarify this in the poll, as I wanted to see how readily people would query, unprompted, what normal even is. Thankfully, lots of people did:
Way more than normal (or what has been normal in recent years, which was basically none). East coast of Scotland
More than was normal the last few years, but less than was normal 30 years ago (Fife)
New normal or old normal? Cheshire/Derbyshire border, a lot more than in recent years but not back to the levels it was 15+ years ago
Can I just make the comment that folks saying more than normal probably mean more than we’ve become used to. “Normal” should be lots more…every year.
Have lost track of what’s normal. (Perthshire).
Normal was many years ago but the insect numbers are certainly healthier this year than they have been for many a year.
If you put it in time frames within the last 10-15 years more than normal. In the last 15-20 years normal and over 20 years ago less than normal
Is normal defined as what we’ve become accustomed to in more recent times, or what we remember from decades ago? The responses that outwardly pondered this were confident that splats were more numerous decades ago. But does the data bear this out?
Bugs matter
Unfortunately, there’s very little data on car splatter in the UK. The most notable attempt to record it was back in June 2004, when 40,000 drivers volunteered to take part in the RSPB’s Big Bug Count.
Participants were asked to wash their registration plates, drive for between 20 and 80 miles, and then count the splats on the plate using a standardised ‘splatometer’.
There wasn’t any previous data with which to gauge relative abundance, but with 324,814 ‘splats’ recorded across all journeys made, the survey clocked just one insect splat every five miles. Unsurprisingly, this was greeted with shock and concern.
At the time, the BBC quoted the RSPB’s Big Bug Count co-ordinator as saying ‘the main aim of the survey was to form the baseline against which we would compare data from future years’. But as far as I’m aware, they didn’t repeat the survey.
It wasn’t in vain, however. 15 years later, Kent Wildlife Trust repeated the experiment, albeit for journeys starting in Kent. They compared the two sets of results and found a 50% decline in splats between 2004 and 2019.
All very interesting of course, but there are problems with comparing two random years, 15 years apart, because either of them could have coincided with natural peaks or troughs in insect abundance that could skew any interpretation of the results. As the Trust said of their survey at the time:
‘one should be cautious about inferring trends of insect abundance from these results until a longer time series of data is available’
Thankfully, that is now happening, because in 2021 the Kent Wildlife Trust teamed up with the invertebrate charity, Buglife, and together they launched their ‘Bug Matters’ app.
The same principles as in 2019 applied, albeit this time UK-wide. Those who enlisted in the survey still counted splats on the reg plate at the end of journeys, but this time an app tracked all of the journeys using GPS, and recorded the length, duration, and average speed of each journey undertaken.
The survey has since become an annual fixture and is currently running its 2025 season. Admittedly, the data is heavily weighted towards the south of the UK and, as recently as 2023, Clackmannanshire, Midlothian and Shetland had yet to have any journeys recorded in the survey.
But Bug Matters are also rightly optimistic about the survey’s potential, because as the number of users grows, along with the amount of data submitted, its potential for bringing insect abundance (or lack thereof) into sharper focus is clear.
Sadly, the larger sample sizes and annual comparisons have so far only confirmed what everyone already suspected – insect decline continues.
UK wide, having apparently declined by 59% between 2004 and 2021, insect splat subsequently declined a further 62.5% between 2021 and 2024. In Scotland the fall across those four years was even higher, at 65.2%.
Among the various theories suggested as to why insect splat might have reduced are: people driving more slowly due to more traffic; or modern cars being more aerodynamic. The latter is addressed in Bug Matters reports, which say that the aerodynamic qualities of the registration plate itself haven’t changed in decades, nor has its location on the leading edge of the vehicle, where the air naturally comes to a stop.
Regardless, away from vehicles, my personal experience of insect abundance in the Lomond Hills and the Cairngorms certainly bears this recent decline out.
Waspless and beeless
2023 in the Lomond Hills was very poor, with hardly anything appearing until mid to late summer. One week into a decent, very warm, dry, sunny spell in June, I tweeted:
Sat outside in the long grass for half an hour and saw a few flies and a bee. One bee. No hoverflies, no butterflies, no click beetles. Nothing.
Others noticed similar:
Same here in West Lothian. We have some solitary bees nesting in our garden but apart from that I barely see any insects at the moment.
Noted around Inverness – Recent riding remarkably and very noticeably clean due to lack of insects.
Into 2024, and BeeWalk, the national bumblebee monitoring scheme run by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, recorded their worst year for bumblebees since the survey began in 2008.
2024 was also the year without wasps. I found lots of aborted golf-ball-sized nests in roof spaces or amongst the heather in the Cairngorms, but no actual wasps. Indeed, the only wasp I saw in the whole of 2024 was dining in a restaurant in Surrey! I didn’t see a single one in Scotland.
Buglife attributed the absence to wet weather, and to winter flooding when dampness and mould took their toll. It’s natural for insect abundance to change year on year, and even within a year, but absences of these extreme kinds, and the regularity with which they now seem to occur, are a worry. As is the overall direction of insect abundance.
Bug Matters say:
“There are several drivers of insect declines, which act alone or in combination – these include habitat loss and fragmentation, pollution on land and in freshwaters, pesticide and herbicide use, light pollution, and climate change.”
None of these things have been reversed in recent years. Indeed arguably, most have got a damn sight worse. So why the glut this spring?
Explanations were offered among the responses I received:
More than norm Loch Lomond. This is only because of the hot weather not rocket science.
Warmer days certainly help. Bugs Matter have found that splat totals increase by 3% with every 1C increase in ambient temperature. But one spell of hot weather does not an insect summer make.
Similarly, while it’s certainly likely that Scotland’s sunniest spring on record, in 2025, has something to do with this year’s glut, it’s unlikely to have been enough, in itself, to produce it.
This is because insect abundance isn’t only governed by what’s happening now, but also what happened over the past year. Was it a wet winter? A dry autumn? Did insects have a good summer last year?
2022 was hot and sunny but my car didn’t get splat like this. And last year (2024), on a July drive down to Surrey and Gloucestershire in horribly warm and sunny weather, much of which was in temperatures between 25C and 32C, my car came home to Braemar clean.
Every year has its warm, sunny spells where insect numbers, relatively speaking, respond accordingly. But that doesn’t mean you’ll get a noticeable glut that stands out as something exceptional.
There are so many variables, not least the fact that insect development is complex. It typically involves two or more life stages, and different extremes of weather can affect each of those stages in different ways and at different times of year. And of course, not all flying insects like or dislike the same things. Midges for example, rather enjoy damp, humid, cloudy weather and don’t do so well in direct sunshine and heatwaves.
Explaining this spring’s high splat count is therefore way above my pay grade I’m afraid. But in risking a little optimism for a change, the question now becomes, will this spring glut be sustained throughout the summer?
The 2024 Bugs Matter report did dare to risk a little optimism in this regard. For while the surveys found that the number of insect splats recorded in the UK fell by 62.5% between 2021 and 2024, that broke down as 27.5% between 2021 and 2022, 43.8% between 2022 and 2023, and a much smaller 8% between 2023 and 2024.
Noting that the rate of decline had slowed in 2024, the report authors tentatively suggested that ‘it may even flatten or reverse in 2025.’ Might this spring glut of bugs be what they hoped? A 2025 recovery? I really hope so, but I’d be quick to caution that a recovery isn’t always what it seems.
I’m reminded of the graphs depicting summer sea ice cover (millions of km2) in the Arctic over the last 50 years. The graphs resemble a mountain range with many peaks and valleys as you move from left to right along the x (horizontal) axis. But the mountains clearly get smaller as you go, and the valleys get deeper.
Only time (and more splat surveys) will show us the true topography of the insect mountain range we’re travelling through, and whether 2025 was a peak or a valley in the grand scheme of things. One thing is certain though. When scarcity becomes the norm, abundance slaps us hard in the face.