(It took me three days to write what essentially is nothing but frustrated ramblings. I've been in a slump regarding my research since September and it's becoming more likely that 2026 will be my last year of doing this.)
When I friend accidentally got me hooked on butterflies after he got inspired by me to pick up photography, I didn't imagine it becoming a full-blown monitoring scheme. The areas I initially chose to search for local butterflies were picked intuitively, meaning that I trusted my gut feelings on where my chances of encountering butterflies will be large enough to learn more about local species. Coincidentally all those areas are places that I visited and engaged with quite often as a kid – though my own childhood memories are far from sufficient and biased beyond redemption, they came in quite handy.
This approach proved quite successful in my case, in fact I was surprised. All areas used to be incredibly sparse in terms of wildlife in general, perhaps a result of the GDR regime and the subsequent de-industrialization that also affected my municipality in various ways. Many spots north of my village turned into illegal landfills, two areas were used as illegal moto-cross tracks (and quite a bunch of people that already were alcoholics prior to reunification made it even more fashionable). Even as a child, I didn't get to see much in terms of flora and fauna beyond large agricultural fields and landfills, despite my parents' endeavors as hobbyist farmers. I may have grown up next to chicken, ducks, geese, sheep, rabbits, pigeons, one cow, a dog and some cats, watched my parents cultivating alfalfa and fodder beet, cutting hay, all that kind of stuff – the only butterfly species I remember vividly were V. atalanta (the first that outright fascinated me since it rested peacefully in our garden), P. rapae and P. brassicae.
This sheer lack of species variety continued well into the 2010's when I visited those places just to clear my head. At this time we did less and less "farmers' stuff" and my dad eventually developed a tumor that required a surgery he never recovered from properly. After his death we decided to only stick to whatever my grandparents still cultivate in their own garden (largely potatoes). Since their garden is located right next to a large hop plantage, the only wildlife I got to encounter over there were a handful of birds at the very best.
Then Covid happened and wildlife suddenly started to flourish. The regular grazing of what now constitutes "the heart" of the area I label "Zone I" stopped and the area produced plants I never got to see before just two years after the outbreak, most notably members of the genus Centaurea – some members of this genus are of great importance to the occurrence of butterflies in particular. Butterflies, moths, cicadas, dozens of birds singing songs I did not recognize. The rabbit population that vanished due to some hunters in Austria and France having caused an unintended myxomatosis epidemic across Central Europe – they struggled to manage their own populations and released the disease into the wild to combat a perceived overpopulation – finally returned and stabilized itself.
It should be mentioned that 2022 was marked by a severe drought, so despite the drought's detrimental effects on plants and animals I still got see far more species than back in 2013, the last year in which I was able to visit my favorite spots outside of winter. I quickly started to get familiar with the science and politics behind this drastic change of my locations and it's fair to say that I'm now even more alienated from anything resembling "ecology", "conservation biology" and any group of academics, politicians and certain farmers (that largely are from different towns and were hired specifically to "manage" certain areas). Some farmers who pride themselves in owning lively biotopes were just as alienated to outright hostile towards current conservation practices and anything it entails. "Odrich Jr.", the owner of "the heart" of "Zone III", went into full-blown rage when we discussed the local conservation efforts that were led by "Untere Naturschutzbehörde". The owner of "the heart" of "Zone II", "David", voiced similar frustrations when we were waiting for the moon eclipse a few months ago, sipping on his beer repeatedly.
None of them know that official state documents and online maps listing their habitats are so wrong that both would suffer from a heart attack. I can't bring myself to show them any of those; they already are frustrated enough despite their property not even falling into out local Natura 2000 network. One couple with a field close to our Natura 2000 habitat (the same couple that also owns parts of "Mixed Field") refuses to talk about it in-depth and are largely avoidant of the topic. I can't tell what they went through when the "bog hill" and neighboring area my parents used to get their hay from for a season were declared a protected area and put under a "protective" management regime but no one is standing behind it, not even those passionate about nature conservation. Even our long-time, now-former mayor of our municipality, who likes me a lot for some reason I just don't get, wasn't even aware that the two old lime trees in front of my home actually are protected and used to carry the famous "Naturschutzeule" (a sign depicting a black owl on yellow background) until they simply rotted away and fell off – and those weren't even acknowledged by fellow landscape architects, ecologists, and any other idiot with an academic degree in biology and relevant earth sciences.
I'm calling those academics "idiots" precisely for the reason that I dropped out of the academic system before I even entered it fully. I attended a grammar school until 10th grade, so I got a taste of what to expect when entering tertiary education; I hated the atmosphere in it and how isolated our school was (and apparently still is) from the rest of our district. We merely learned for tests, rephrased Wikipedia articles to not get caught engaging in plagiarism, and ignored every single social problem that occurred on our school yard (and no one even wanted to talk about that one time where someone broke into the school and vandalized the property with hooked crosses and nazi slogans). We were trained in how to become self-obsessed jerks at the end of the day and not even the few truly passionate teachers that eventually started to suffer from it had any effect on this.
Now imagine this kind of attitude and less knowledge about flora and fauna than your average village idiot. Most people from my municipality I talked to, even those that seemed unapproachable and disinterested in what I do at first glance, appreciate my efforts much more than any organized conservation project. Why? Because I talk to those involved in a casual way and don't pretend that I know more than they do. And certainly I don't use my skills to expect some kind of special treatment; they simply have become "allergic" to people that use their statuses and credentials to not engage with them AT ALL. At most they announce their intentions via our free "Amtsblatt" (which no one truly reads beyond the list of traffic construction zones and obituaries) and our bulletin board (which most people ignore because it's either empty or filled with ads for local events and dates for non-public meetings – make out of the latter what you will, I don't get it either). They come over, do their stuff while property owners are absent, and hand the data to the Bundesland where they end up rotting on their servers and are hard to find even by their own staff.
I admit that I didn't have to read the analysis of my local Natura 2000 area because I could already tell from afar that whatever they claimed would be good for it was far more damaging than simply letting run natural succession its course:
- most bushes were removed back when I got my red bike at the age of 9, exposing a path that is so underused that those very old bushes have started to grow back,
- the tiny meadow orchard lost half of its fruit trees during the 2018 drought but nearly every dead tree was simply cleared entirely; the southern sides are void of any of the plants they used as their justification for their planned overgrazing,
- they completely missed the fact that this area is particularly prone to sinkholes due to its above-average amount of groundwater streams underground; this place used to be part of a massive bog and wasn't drained until the mid-1920s, now offering multiple groundwater-filled sinkholes they merely classify as "dirty ponds in need of cleaning", not realizing that those are just new bogs and swamp-like water bodies that mitigate the risk of my village getting flooded (there even is a brand-new sinkhole in the making on top of the hill, dragging a lone cherry tree down and a relatively high amount of desired nectar plants down, and this is the only spot where I've encountered the highest insect density on the hill itself; most observations actually are made on the path leading to the hill and outside the actual Natura 2000 area while the vast majority is dominated by tall grasses and bare soil!);
- the only indication that this area's legally protected is a sign tourists cannot even reach most of the time and even brags about the fact that its soil temperatures can reach 60°C during summer – how the fuck can they brag about this whilst simultaneously whine about climate change?!
- speaking of this sign, it only lists a handful of species, most of which either are generally more common within the basin (P. icarus actually mostly avoids this hill whereas the unmentioned P. argus, Colias sp. and Melitaea sp. are almost exclusive to this area; odonata are not mentioned at all despite being among the strictly-protected insects!) or were accidentally imported via contaminated seeds and shoes several years after reunification (technically every plant that is native to Southern Europe that now have vanished just as fast as they suddenly started to show up and weren't recorded in any capacity prior to 1995);
- the shepherd that "managed" every zone until 2019 (and until 2023 in Zone I) constantly yelled at his dogs and barely had any control over them; I heard his yelling through my closed "office" windows facing Zone I.
In short, I fully understand the local people's frustrations because they had no say whatsoever and were not asked about anything, not even about potentially critical knowledge about our local biotopes and our village's past that contributed to this.
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This brings me to my main point. As much as the local people appreciate my efforts and my contributions, just seeing how professionals, politicians and administrative bodies have been acting for decades is beyond discouraging since they easily could overrule any of our efforts on arbitrary grounds. It also doesn't help that more and more "Etsy girls" contribute to the black market of illegally-traded animals because they cannot even grasp that their "exotic" dead butterfly in a frame is a protected species that is under threat not only due to habitat loss but also due to hunting just for their "aesthetics" – even worse, someone I used to consider a (shitty) friend that stalked and harassed me for roughly a decade recently started to sell such frames and intentionally hides the origins of the dead animals alongside her new address.
I'm not sure whether to continue my research beyond 2026. It was just supposed to be a silly hobby where I get more familiar with my local nature and bond with my friend over a shared interest. But the more I learn about why my local flora and fauna were in such a poor state until 2020 – and some still happen to be or even degraded further – I just get sick to the stomach. There's hardly anything left that I still enjoy about my amateur research.
This year's summary already was completed in October and I also started to work on some maps that I sadly cannot share without doxxing myself and the two farmers I promised to not share any details about their properties to keep those places hidden from tourists, (local) politicians, snobby academics and greedy farmers. It's not even a full-time job, hell I'M not payed for any of this, but it's just as demanding and sometimes even more than that.