Our road network began to expand with ever faster highways and a great increase in vehicles Not long after the Second World War ended.

Cars had straight windscreens in those days, which meant they were often covered in dead flies on faster journeys.

Car overs fitted oblong plastic discs to the their front bonnets to combat this, so the air flow passed over the windscreens.

Not that it mattered, because about 50 years ago insects including butterflies, moths, bees and flies suffered a massive decline.

I was frequently stabbed When as a boy by a noisy mosquito at night and often had several red marks the next morning.

But I haven’t seen a mosquito for more than 50 years!

As a child on visits to wild Wales as we drove along narrow roads, the eyes of rabbits sitting in the verges shone and a veritable ‘snowstorm’ of small moths were caught in headlights.

Nowadays if I drove along those same roads there would be no rabbits nor moths to be seen.

Naturally this all causes a knock-on effect and has caused a similar decline in bats, swifts, flycatchers, swallows and martins whose sole diets consists of flying insects caught on the wing. A very sad state of affairs indeed.