Fire weather?

The four crows of the anthropocene apocalypse, perhaps?

Sitting in a leafless, dying ash tree.

In our part of West Wales, this July certainly hasn’t lived up to an obvious Fireweather description. The Met Office summary for the whole month reflects the poor weather here. 123.8 mm of rain, generally cool and just 7 dry days in total. (And then, just as I’d written these opening lines of this post, a brief spell of hot sunny weather, with 3 of those dry days and temperatures reaching the mid-twenties has exhausted us both in a flurry of mainly manual haymaking activity).

And then, coincidentally, a maelstrom of horrible events have hit the UK.

However, leaving those to one side, during the first week of the month, I devoured John Vaillant’s award-winning 2023 book ‘Fire Weather – A True Story from a Hotter World.’ Its powerful message hasn’t left me. The story of the latest massive fires in California and Canada over the last few days brought it to mind again as I began to write this post up.

It’s not just the story of the extensive and extreme bitumen-based tar sands fire in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada in 2016, which was the starting point for Vaillant’s 7-year research project culminating in the book’s completion. It’s just as much about humans’ (or as he’s re-named us, Homo flagrans – ‘burning man’), apparent taming of fire in very recent times: our addiction to flames, fire and heat in many guises, and the trillions of combustion episodes which we all, often subconsciously, contribute to every single day. All ignited on our very special blue planet with its surprisingly thin, life-supporting gaseous envelope which makes life as we know it possible.

It’s undeniable that there have always been many natural origin fires on earth, caused by lightning and volcanic eruptions. Indeed some very extensive vegetation belts and ecosystems have evolved to rely on such regular events. However, over the last 100 years or so, we’ve ramped up combustion incidents exponentially, primarily through our use of fossil fuels. At his best, Vaillant (a rather appropriate name for the author of such a book) writes beautifully, almost poetically, about how one could make a case for thinking of fire as being an animate entity – moving, consuming, requiring oxygen, always seeking out the next, better opportunity to survive and propagate. Yet he also writes with shocking details about the horrific intensity of the McMurray fire, and what it shows is likely to become ever more common in the years ahead. He lays bare the longstanding scientific warnings that scientists associated with the petrochemical industry have known about for many decades – continue along the path of fossil fuel resource exploitation, and our atmosphere, and the delicate balance of nature and life might be irrevocably wrecked.

The two most simple and vivid thoughts I was left with were his calculation of the biomass of cyanobacteria or phytoplankton which, for example, had to live, die and build up over millions of years, to (eventually) produce enough hydrocarbons to fill up the average car petrol tank: it equates to about 15 blue whales of weight. Now there’s a thought to conjure up, next time one fill’s up one’s tank. More importantly I’ve churned around the obvious fact, which we all know, that if one connects a hose to an exhaust pipe of a typical petrol engine car, feeds it in through a nearly closed car window, and runs the engine, the car’s occupants will probably be dead within a matter of a few minutes. Feed the exhaust gases through the hose into a typical sized room, and it might take an hour or two for the same end result.

Yet we all drive around, with the exhaust fumes directed into the invisible life sustaining air above us, and never give it a second thought. Perhaps we should?

Here’s a 15 minute video of Vaillant speaking, which I hope will persuade any readers unfamiliar with this towering inferno of a book, to buy a copy. Or consume it in some other form.

And then what?

That’s the BIG question which I’ve pondered for many years, brought into much sharper focus by ‘Fireweather’. What do we do about it? How do we change our lives? Or is it all up to our (highly regarded?) political leaders to make the tough calls and restrict the freedoms we’ve become accustomed to in many ‘Western/advanced’ economies in recent times?

Or is the scenario so bleak, that we think we’re all doomed?

And if so, with this stance, does one use this as an intellectual cop-out clause absolving any individual of any personal responsibility, since heck, we’re all doomed regardless.

This is meant to be provocative. We could, I guess, all do better. We all live lives riddled with intellectual hypocrisy. (Don’t we?)

I’m with Vaillant on his final comments in both video and book: those of optimism and hope. I think we have to have a little of this, even when the situation might seem to be locked into a downward spiral. He also introduces a new word of the month, for me – Revirescence. Nature’s default optimistic, flourishing response to adverse times, given half a chance. To recover, reproduce and re-green. Just how well we’re all doing in giving nature such chances seems a moot point, but perhaps again we can all make lifestyle changes and choices which will have impacts.

Long term readers will appreciate that we’ve been trying to plough our own furrowed and sometimes harrowing attempt at lower impact living in recent years, and around us we see some evidence of nature’s positive revirescent response. 11 years of mainly manual toil have transformed some of our small fields into flower filled meadows. Our garden area is now stuffed with insect friendly flowers for most of the year. A simple descriptive term I introduced to this blog many years ago, very conscious that there’s so much more out there than the usual focus on instantly appealing butterflies and bees. And all flowers simply don’t have the same appeal to many insect groups, as the most appealing – whether or not we value them as highly.  (The tree images included in this section above are all dead or dying ones around our land: ash, larch, cherry: this is a new phenomenon of just the last few years – many are immature trees, not simply dying of old age).

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Where have all the insects gone this year? I’m including a short Youtube montage I’ve made in the last couple of days after filming a large bat foraging, at length, around our yard during the daytime. Not once, but twice – first around 3.30 pm on 26th July, and again the following morning around 11.30 am. This is not normal bat behaviour and almost certainly indicates a lack of suitable food, since bats are much more liable to be predated if they fly around in broad daylight. It’s something I’ve very rarely seen before, and not for so long, in the heat of the day. You might even notice a solitary swallow overflying at the same time. In years gone by we’d have multiple swallows by this time of the year, as well as house martins, and, going back even further, swifts, which nested on our then neighbour’s house. They’ve all gone. We also no longer see pied or spotted flycatchers around the house and garden.

However, after editing the footage on the computer I noticed something else really amazing. There are obviously quite a few honey bees which appear on the scene, whizzing across the sky. But when I looked REALLY closely I noticed that some of these seemed to be following the bat, maybe even trying to harry it in the way that swallows will follow a sparrowhawk. I couldn’t see the bat attempting to eat any of the bees. So what on earth is going on here?

I have two hypotheses: The first is that they are male drones, with their huge eyes, and no sting, following the bat thinking it’s a potential mate. Drones’ principal role in life is to fly off to aerial congregation zones to meet up with virgin queen honey bees. Then mate with them, and if successful in a competitive mating orgy, then immediately die and drop to the ground with their reproductive organs ripped from their body during the act of mating. Sorry, but it’s a tough life being a male honey bee (when you’re not lounging around in the hive, eating the nectar that the hard working female foragers collect). The second option I suggest is that the chasing bees are those female foraging workers, armed with a single use sting, somehow annoyed by the sonic emissions from the bat, and trying to attack it – extremely odd behaviour for a worker bee away from the hive, which very rarely approach anything in this aggressive way. I favour the drone option. But I genuinely can’t find any references to this behaviour on line, although it’s known that drones will fly after a mock up of a queen bee dragged through one of the special aerial drone congregation zones, and more recent work has used radar tracking to follow drones on their flights in search of virgin queens.

But back to the general decline in insect numbers. I made a short YouTube film of swallows and house martins suddenly exploiting, in a feeding frenzy, an insect hatch around the sycamore tree above shepherd’s hut. That was just 3 years ago, in mid-June.

Now the skies around us are largely deserted, Perhaps soon, the rusty metal swallows we hopefully banged into the end of our barn might be the only external local hint of days gone by. Along with written words, filmed images and fading memories.

There are probably multiple reasons for this decline in insect numbers, but even in our rural location with the vibrant wildflower meadows, and hedge banks currently brimming with bramble flowers and willowherbs, there seem to be far fewer insects than normal. Particularly few hoverflies of any description. Interestingly there are some exceptions – our 6 zero/minimal intervention honey bee colonies all seem to be very active, and our poor sheep have been really bothered again this year with head flies. A curse for them, since the irritation causes them to rub their eyes and face, since fly swatting clearly isn’t an option for them. We’re very reluctant to use any insecticides on them, but this year have had to apply a topical permethrin based product to the worst affected, and bring them inside into a lambing pen until their self-inflicted trauma resolves, and the peak of such fly numbers declines. Interestingly, it’s 3 of our older ewes which are affected worst. Just as we react more now to horsefly and spider bites – the picture above shows how I reacted (worryingly) in early July within 24 hours of  (but always unseen culprit) small double puncture, probably spider bites –  with significant erythema and oedema. We suspect that repeated exposure over several years, might be triggering a heightened immune response in some of our sheep.

One plant which highlights this apparent dearth of insects well is illustrated in these photos. They show the largely empty pitcher vessels on the few Sarracenia plants we have around the house and upper pond. We bought a selection years ago for a potential trial which our older son was hoping to carry out on using biological control for nuisance flies around sewage treatment plants. The trial never got off the ground, so we kept a few plants close to the house, to rotate inside the kitchen for fly control over the late spring and summer. By now, the pitchers are usually stuffed with all manner of moths, flies, wasps and sadly on occasion bumblebees. This year many pitchers are completely empty, and in the others, there are just a few insects very low down in the juices, and difficult to get the camera to focus on.

The days of us needing to change fly papers inside the kitchen two or three times during a summer, are long gone too. We’ve had no large flies this year, just a couple of small ones, with no indoor Sarracenia or fly paper needed.

Lest you all think it’s just a problem around here, and maybe even made worse by us owning these non-native plants, listen to what Professor Dave Goulson, a fellow Adams Grammar School alumni, said on this topic at the beginning of July.

Now we’re 3 weeks later than the date Goulson posted this Youtube, the temperatures have risen, and there’s still no sign of any improvement in numbers. You could even think of checking out the long term citizen science data collection project that BugLife has been running for nearly 20 years. It shows a decline in insect numbers in Wales, over that 20 year period, of about 79%. No insects, and any insect eating bird or mammal is clearly going to have problems. Pollination of many plants, including many human food crops will also be affected. As the Buglife strapline of their mission statement simply puts it:

Saving the small things that run the planet.

We’ve noticed over many years, that insect numbers do fluctuate dramatically from one year to the next, but surely the BugLife data, and the disappearance of once widespread birds from our landscapes look awfully like a sign of an impending ecosystem collapse. Whether it’s a reversible one, in any of our lifetimes may well be determined by the collective judgement calls and behavioural responses of the totality of the Homo flagrans population in the years ahead.

With one of my old man scientist’s hats on, I’m certainly curious as to what might be causing such an apparently widespread insect population crash. Habitat loss – probably a factor. Excessive use of (mainly) agricultural pesticides and herbicides? Again a likely factor in many parts of the world. Weather, and climate will likely be playing some role. And if so, what are the specific mechanisms? Why are our honey bees doing so well? Obviously they can better survive the very different weather we’re now experiencing in their well insulated boxes, much better than many solitary free-living insects with honey stores to get them through persistently inclement flying conditions.

Might more honey bees in the environment be playing a competitive adverse role? Possibly, but many insect types don’t compete for food resources with honey bees. (The upcoming HoneyBeeWatch symposium might delve into this topic in a little more detail). It certainly can’t be excessive predation of insects, since many of the daytime predatory bird numbers have evidently declined. Have bat numbers increased? It seems unlikely, even given the considerable resources devoted to their preservation. Could the numberplate splatter survey data indicate that increased transportation over recent years has gradually worn insect population numbers down?

For anyone interested in this topic, as I clearly am, this review article, “Insect decline in the Anthropocene: Death by a thousand cuts – David L. Wagner, Eliza M. Grames, Matthew L. Forister, and David Stopak” (and other papers published in the same special feature) might prove to be an interesting starting point for further enquiry.

Sadly for all our technological progress and scientific endeavour in recent decades, we’ve precious little long term data to come to firm conclusions about what’s really going on with insect declines. We’ve stupidly not been paying enough attention to what many who live in rural areas have noticed for ages, in a vague “it’s not how things used to be” way.

Fireweather? Insect declines?

For those interested in previous apocalyptic events in human history, recorded in one way or another, there’s always this image to study:

The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Oil on canvas, 136.3 x 212.3 cm. Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne by John Martin, 1852.

For those unfamiliar with the details of the written records (as I was) which inspired Martin’s graphic portrayal of a Fireweather-type event, albeit not apparently an entirely natural one, it’s worth reading these descriptions (albeit a more contemporary version than that available in Martin’s era) from Genesis Chapter 18 and 19

Factual description? Allegorical story? Part of our erstwhile Western civilisation’s canon and moral compass? Or irrelevant ancient verse, worthy of being cancelled from today’s historical perspective? I’d suggest it’s a least worth a read. And maybe a ponder. But perhaps most particularly for the organisers of the recent Olympic Opening Ceremony: in the light of the recent furore, or over-reaction (take your pick), to the frankly bizarre drag queen oddity of one part of the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, which took place last Friday. Not only did this scene incense many millions of viewers around the world for its crudity and offensive (parody?) portrayal of Da Vinci’s famous Last Supper painting, but as with most such subjects these days, many mainstream media sought to downplay the global adverse reaction to it. This piece, “Very odd: The way mainstream media ‘reported’ on Last Supper parody at Olympics” summarises this point very well, I thought.

It’s probably long overdue for me at this point to lighten the mood in this blogpost and introduce a romantic piece of piano music from a similar era to that in which the artist John Martin was painting his expansive works. This transcription for piano by Franz Liszt of an earlier Schubert song, was discovered by me after listening to the concert by Welsh pianist, Llŷr Williams, at the recent local Llandeilo Music Festival. Williams not only loves the music of Schubert, but also the ‘jazzed up’ Liszt transcriptions of some of Schubert’s glorious song melodies. Here’s a recording played by the Georgian pianist, Mariam Batsashvili playing Liszt:’s ‘Lieder aus Franz Schubert’s Schwanengesang’, S. 560: No. 7 Ständchen. (I can’t find a YouTube of Williams playing it, although I’ve bought his live Schubert Journey recordings CDs).

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I noticed three more lovely, and unplanned What3Plants combinations this year, which I’ve turned into short YouTubes, below. I’d love to replicate the first plant mix over a wider area, if I can bulk the plants up – the rose is easy to propagate from cuttings and both of the Geraniums come fairly true from seed.

Rose de Rescht, Geranium psilostemon and Geranium pratense ‘Silver Queen’:

Camassia leichtlinii ‘Alba’, Geranium phaeum and Aquilegia vulgaris:

Sidalcea ‘Elsie Heugh’, Dahlia merckii and Rose ‘Grouse’:

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This much I know

 

This much I know, I think, is real.

The sweat-drenched shirt, the dog-tired limbs.

Wind. Warmth. Sun-dried, at last, grass wilts.

Sweet-oiled scents rise. Not once, not twice

But four times turned, now wind-row raked.

No touch, no feel to tell it’s dried

Swwisshhed rustles rolled, back down and up

Or contour wide from side to side

My hay trance dance on autocue repeat

Yet still surprised. I catch the roar.

Jolts my rhythm. I turn, sky scan

In time to catch no distant jet

No road-raced bike – I should have known.

A fag-end tail, ten thousand wings

Speeds, arrowed North. Fly worthless swarm.

Doomed so soon, as dead ash lost. Gone.

I lean and pause, my birch-toothed rake

An ancient prop. No shots, no sounds

These words, your trust, no fact-checked deal.

This much I know, I think, is real.

 

Beyond this sloping flower-strewn field

Beyond what I can see, touch, feel

Can contemplation sieve the disparate

Desperate ever widening confusion.

A bloodied ear. A drop-dead dive.

Clenched fist salute. Blue perfect, cloudless sky.

Crooks and snipers, witness words.

Images, ideas, teased bullet audio files.

Sloping roofs and water towers.

Mock-ups, montages, scoped rifle shots.

Exploding skulls, what ifs, why nots.

The ripples roll, the pressure mounts.

Fact-checkers stir the brew. Trump this?

 

And now? I’m lost.

Matrix trapped, mind blown.

 

I scan the forecasts, read the runes.

Long for simple certainty once more.

The pitchfork toss, the hay rake roll.

This much, I know, is real.

 

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Perhaps I should rewrite this poem now, and add another verse after the other news from the last few days.

We’re not great Coldplay fans, and certainly wouldn’t go within a very long distance of the Glastonbury Festival. However, one of the highlights from this year’s sunny event was the band’s closing performance of ‘Fix you’,  one of the songs we’ve always enjoyed from their album X&Y.

In the (vain?) hope that harmony might spread out across our very multicultural nation, and soon, it seems strangely more appropriate now, than my original Fireweather thought for including it:

“Lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones”.

Would that it were this simple.

‘Tears stream down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace…

And I will try to fix you’..

For as long as it’s available, I hope you enjoy this: