25 09 07
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who decrees decay
allows for growth
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The little fly, meanbh-chuileag, Culicoides impunctatus, needs blood for its life cycle, which it draws unasked through its rolled mouthparts from mammals unfortunate enough to be in its vicinity. This, on lower, wetter ground in Ardnamurchan, is most of us who venture outside; with one hectare (about the size of a shinty field) reckoned to host to as many as 24 million larvae of that particular fly.
The adults draw energy more acceptably from flowers’ nectar, but it’s also a detritivore, feeding on rotting vegetation.
Among its predators are the insectivorous plants - sundews & butterworts, but even together with others – dragonflies, swifts, pipistrelles, palmated newts & the common lizard, these cannot keep pace with the sheer numbers of these midges with their bloodsucking habits.
Round about now, the midges begin to fade away, adults dying off in the colder, wetter & windier weather that’s blowing in after the autumnal equinox. They are generally all gone by October. The final instar of the larva, however, overwinters in the ground, making sure of species continuance & mammal discomfort (mainly deer & humans) next year. The females, it seems, smell our breath & the presence of lactic acid. The first bite, & taste of blood, & she’ll release pheromones to attract her sisters. Maybe the answer is to neither take milk nor to breathe. Nobody has ever recorded dead vegans being bitten.
The disappearance of the midge happens at the same time as the migration of the martins that flickered over & round the byres all summer. Here in Gobsheallach, their nesting sites had been disturbed by recent building works & the prowling cats, but having flown for up to three months from sub-Saharan Africa to get here, they don’t give up easily. With the hills changing from purple to brown, though, they’re away south again, apparently landing long enough to rest & then make the dangerous journey maybe fifteen thousand miles north, a hundred and sixty odd miles a day, to arrive in time to help eat midges.
Bluetongue fits into my imagination somewhere between bluestocking & the nose of a permanently & amiably confused drinker. The bluetongue virus could affect the other controversial mammals in these parts, along with foot & mouth: sheep. Although the virus has so far been found in the UK only in a part of England, maybe five hundred miles from here, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) estimates that the midge which spreads this virus (the same genus as the meanbh-chuileag) can travel maybe a mile a day; “However, if caught in suitable meteorological conditions midges can be carried much farther distances, especially over water masses, i.e. more than 200 km (124 miles)”. Bluetongue virus was first described in South Afrca, coincidentally where “our” housemartins have been recorded landing.
Sheep here are practically as wild as the deer they share the hill with. Although, safely grazing on sea grasses & on the tidal islets in the bay, the small black Hebridean sheep & their sometimes piebald lambs are approachable enough. As is Charley, the one-eyed tup, who wants only to overwinter in my kitchen; drink my malt for all I know. Difficult to control, then. I’ve seen crofters, aunties, uncles & postmen pressed into service, with dogs sometimes hindering the gathering for shearing or dipping, all running & shouting across the sands, over the thrift & campion, re-enacting somehow a Keystone comedy. The midges, though, have no such trouble with sheep or deer.
Another sort of clearing of the land, again with financial subtexts, may soon afflict people here. The advent (coming with the wind) of the bluetongue midge, neither amiable nor at all literary may take up where unscrupulous landlords left off.
The Sunart show, just after the first foot & mouth movement restriction orders in the summer, was a sad affair: no sheep or cattle. A wet west Highland day, with only a hectoring Loch Lomondside farmer displaying his sheepdogs’ skill in herding (flocking?) ducks from one part of the central ring to another, not once but twice.
Ardnamurchan, described in one attempt to attract tourists as “almost an island”, jutting as it does with its odd rhino head into the Atlantic between Mull & the small isles of Rum, Eigg, Muck & Canna, its eye a ring-dyke of volcanic origin, is most definitely not an island – as if water were in any case a safeguard from viruses.
The commonwealth of martins & the interlocking communities of deer, humans & midges ebb & flow. With the midges & the martins, the motorhomes move at their stately pace along the single track roads, southing, overwintering, perhaps, with bluetongue midges. Their place in local economy is debated; with a former B&B crofter, (her croft now one of the best examples of Sunart oakwoods) speaking of their coming into the area coinciding with the decline of her business. As they depart, the other caravan dwellers return – the travellers are back in Glen Tarbert – a glen of winter deer. The travellers were here long before the holidaying motor home-owners; before the feudal-minded industrialists who bought sporting estates in the late nineteenth century. Alastair Cameron, in his “Annals and Recollections of Sunart” records of their spring arrival (together with the long disappeared “milestone inspectors”) in the first decade of the twentieth century: “it was nothing unusual for me on my way home from school to meet three or four squads of them with their carts and horses. Stewarts, Macmillans, Johnstones, Williamsons, and up till 1908 or thereabouts, Browns and Wilsons were the most regular.” They were kindly received, with their tales & tinware.
People cleared for sheep; sheep cleared for deer; conceivably deer & sheep both giving way to a virus; travellers yielding to tourists. Depopulation continues.
more later
******************************************************
who decrees decay
allows for growth
********************************************************
The little fly, meanbh-chuileag, Culicoides impunctatus, needs blood for its life cycle, which it draws unasked through its rolled mouthparts from mammals unfortunate enough to be in its vicinity. This, on lower, wetter ground in Ardnamurchan, is most of us who venture outside; with one hectare (about the size of a shinty field) reckoned to host to as many as 24 million larvae of that particular fly.
The adults draw energy more acceptably from flowers’ nectar, but it’s also a detritivore, feeding on rotting vegetation.
Among its predators are the insectivorous plants - sundews & butterworts, but even together with others – dragonflies, swifts, pipistrelles, palmated newts & the common lizard, these cannot keep pace with the sheer numbers of these midges with their bloodsucking habits.
Round about now, the midges begin to fade away, adults dying off in the colder, wetter & windier weather that’s blowing in after the autumnal equinox. They are generally all gone by October. The final instar of the larva, however, overwinters in the ground, making sure of species continuance & mammal discomfort (mainly deer & humans) next year. The females, it seems, smell our breath & the presence of lactic acid. The first bite, & taste of blood, & she’ll release pheromones to attract her sisters. Maybe the answer is to neither take milk nor to breathe. Nobody has ever recorded dead vegans being bitten.
The disappearance of the midge happens at the same time as the migration of the martins that flickered over & round the byres all summer. Here in Gobsheallach, their nesting sites had been disturbed by recent building works & the prowling cats, but having flown for up to three months from sub-Saharan Africa to get here, they don’t give up easily. With the hills changing from purple to brown, though, they’re away south again, apparently landing long enough to rest & then make the dangerous journey maybe fifteen thousand miles north, a hundred and sixty odd miles a day, to arrive in time to help eat midges.
Bluetongue fits into my imagination somewhere between bluestocking & the nose of a permanently & amiably confused drinker. The bluetongue virus could affect the other controversial mammals in these parts, along with foot & mouth: sheep. Although the virus has so far been found in the UK only in a part of England, maybe five hundred miles from here, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) estimates that the midge which spreads this virus (the same genus as the meanbh-chuileag) can travel maybe a mile a day; “However, if caught in suitable meteorological conditions midges can be carried much farther distances, especially over water masses, i.e. more than 200 km (124 miles)”. Bluetongue virus was first described in South Afrca, coincidentally where “our” housemartins have been recorded landing.
Sheep here are practically as wild as the deer they share the hill with. Although, safely grazing on sea grasses & on the tidal islets in the bay, the small black Hebridean sheep & their sometimes piebald lambs are approachable enough. As is Charley, the one-eyed tup, who wants only to overwinter in my kitchen; drink my malt for all I know. Difficult to control, then. I’ve seen crofters, aunties, uncles & postmen pressed into service, with dogs sometimes hindering the gathering for shearing or dipping, all running & shouting across the sands, over the thrift & campion, re-enacting somehow a Keystone comedy. The midges, though, have no such trouble with sheep or deer.
Another sort of clearing of the land, again with financial subtexts, may soon afflict people here. The advent (coming with the wind) of the bluetongue midge, neither amiable nor at all literary may take up where unscrupulous landlords left off.
The Sunart show, just after the first foot & mouth movement restriction orders in the summer, was a sad affair: no sheep or cattle. A wet west Highland day, with only a hectoring Loch Lomondside farmer displaying his sheepdogs’ skill in herding (flocking?) ducks from one part of the central ring to another, not once but twice.
Ardnamurchan, described in one attempt to attract tourists as “almost an island”, jutting as it does with its odd rhino head into the Atlantic between Mull & the small isles of Rum, Eigg, Muck & Canna, its eye a ring-dyke of volcanic origin, is most definitely not an island – as if water were in any case a safeguard from viruses.
The commonwealth of martins & the interlocking communities of deer, humans & midges ebb & flow. With the midges & the martins, the motorhomes move at their stately pace along the single track roads, southing, overwintering, perhaps, with bluetongue midges. Their place in local economy is debated; with a former B&B crofter, (her croft now one of the best examples of Sunart oakwoods) speaking of their coming into the area coinciding with the decline of her business. As they depart, the other caravan dwellers return – the travellers are back in Glen Tarbert – a glen of winter deer. The travellers were here long before the holidaying motor home-owners; before the feudal-minded industrialists who bought sporting estates in the late nineteenth century. Alastair Cameron, in his “Annals and Recollections of Sunart” records of their spring arrival (together with the long disappeared “milestone inspectors”) in the first decade of the twentieth century: “it was nothing unusual for me on my way home from school to meet three or four squads of them with their carts and horses. Stewarts, Macmillans, Johnstones, Williamsons, and up till 1908 or thereabouts, Browns and Wilsons were the most regular.” They were kindly received, with their tales & tinware.
People cleared for sheep; sheep cleared for deer; conceivably deer & sheep both giving way to a virus; travellers yielding to tourists. Depopulation continues.
more later
**********************************************************
21 09 07
“ . . . after it’s over – it’s gone, into the air. You can never capture it again.”
Eric Dolphy said this in interview about live improvised music, although it was spliced in to his final recording – Last Date. I guess it’s how I feel about this semi-spontaneous journal I’m starting here. The journal, of course, can be recaptured in a number of ways after it’s published on the internet; it can be rewritten, too – but it appears here for the first time in its mostly unedited form. Drafts always make me a little nervous.
I like the notion of a blog. A weblog. An Indra’s web of communication, with each node a word, a syllable even.
Indra’s net - an infinite web with a jewel at each vertex, each jewel reflecting all the other jewels - a metaphor for interconnectedness. I enjoy the near-democracy of a blog. Near-democracy, because, although anyone can write anything for her own blog, in fact it’s restricted to those with access to the internet, to a world which denies its constituent parts in a way unthinkable to a true democrat. A human form of communication, then. Not a web tree, (as I am surrounded by a web of trees here in Ardnamurchan, together with their allies, co-dependants & symbiotes) or even a log, home to mosses & lichens, coleoptera & fungi, failing a tree; though it will be a record of sequential (sometimes circular) data – a log.
A true weblog might be a we blog – an assertion of a democratic notion. What would the collective we blog (we be log) of a colony of insects read like? Of bees or of ants? Perhaps not too far from our own concerns.
I’m not sure then, if this is a blog, a weblog; it’s not a we blog; nor is it an eco log nor an eclogue. More, perhaps a journey-work, a travel, a travail among trees in Sunart woodlands & their varied communities. I can’t speak for anyone but myself, of course, but it may reflect a place where these communities are paramount; since nothing on a human scale, much, happens here.
The tide comes into the bay, then goes out. The bay is, at high tide, just outside the window here. It connects with, & is part of, the Atlantic ocean. My perceptions connect me to it. These we blog words, this travail, read by you, connects us.
A true work, to emphasise this, our interdependence; what the poet Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing.
Another dram, anyone?
“ . . . after it’s over – it’s gone, into the air. You can never capture it again.”
Eric Dolphy said this in interview about live improvised music, although it was spliced in to his final recording – Last Date. I guess it’s how I feel about this semi-spontaneous journal I’m starting here. The journal, of course, can be recaptured in a number of ways after it’s published on the internet; it can be rewritten, too – but it appears here for the first time in its mostly unedited form. Drafts always make me a little nervous.
I like the notion of a blog. A weblog. An Indra’s web of communication, with each node a word, a syllable even.
Indra’s net - an infinite web with a jewel at each vertex, each jewel reflecting all the other jewels - a metaphor for interconnectedness. I enjoy the near-democracy of a blog. Near-democracy, because, although anyone can write anything for her own blog, in fact it’s restricted to those with access to the internet, to a world which denies its constituent parts in a way unthinkable to a true democrat. A human form of communication, then. Not a web tree, (as I am surrounded by a web of trees here in Ardnamurchan, together with their allies, co-dependants & symbiotes) or even a log, home to mosses & lichens, coleoptera & fungi, failing a tree; though it will be a record of sequential (sometimes circular) data – a log.
A true weblog might be a we blog – an assertion of a democratic notion. What would the collective we blog (we be log) of a colony of insects read like? Of bees or of ants? Perhaps not too far from our own concerns.
I’m not sure then, if this is a blog, a weblog; it’s not a we blog; nor is it an eco log nor an eclogue. More, perhaps a journey-work, a travel, a travail among trees in Sunart woodlands & their varied communities. I can’t speak for anyone but myself, of course, but it may reflect a place where these communities are paramount; since nothing on a human scale, much, happens here.
The tide comes into the bay, then goes out. The bay is, at high tide, just outside the window here. It connects with, & is part of, the Atlantic ocean. My perceptions connect me to it. These we blog words, this travail, read by you, connects us.
A true work, to emphasise this, our interdependence; what the poet Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing.
Another dram, anyone?
**********************************************************
I’m given an unexpected release of tears this morning. On the CD player, I’m playing Verdi’s Requiem, with Ezio Piza & Beniamino Gigli, the great tenor of his day. The formality of the Latin verse, in the Italian pronunciation, suggestive as the words of a lover. Piza’s profound bass rolls in the low & rocky Ardnamurchan hills. I listen to the Dies Irae & “the trumpet scattering wonderful sound” & I’m moved. The words & music reach into me to find something I didn’t know was there, & the Quid sum miser: “Who am I, wretched man, to say, whom ask to intercede, when the just man is barely safe?” forces what’s inside to my eyes.
Recorded in August 1939, with the full atrocities of another miserable war breaking .
I heard the day’s news: Israeli planes in Syria, soldier killed in Hellmand explosion, UK to retain certain types of cluster bombs, US private contractors open fire randomly in Iraq; fundamentalists killing each other & us. How do I reconcile this requiem – a plea to a god in whom I can’t believe – with holy wars?
I can take no more & turn off the actual music, pull on my boots & hat, walk out & up the hill.
Every day here at Gobsheallach, I visit the wood ant colonies. They are in a dip in the road, a single track. To the north, ascending the hill, are thin birches & wind-broken small oaks, all sitting among mosses & ferns and outcrops of rock emblazoned with lichen circles. To the south, where the burn gathers force, are alders, whose first spring growth had a fine papal & sexual purpling.
These little colonies – for they are little, unlike those classic ziggurats on the other side of the bay at the edge of the sitka plantation – have grown despite the maniac flailings of the hedging & verging machine, which, during the growing seasons, periodically demolishes their citadels. But their colonies survive. I don’t know what will become of the other communities when the plantation over there is clear felled.
I love these ants. They are Scottish wood ants, Formica aquilonia (though this colony of perhaps a hundred thousand may be Formica lugubris. There is plenty to mourn). Seangan, in Gaelic, the noun common to all ants: pismire; this one’s a fairly large ant with a dark head and abdomen & red thorax. Scarce in most of Britain, though as its name might imply, apparently plentiful here. Her work is never over. One mound is on the flat into soft earth, with bracken shading from the heat of the summer sun. Another is built on a rock outcrop. Here, at some point, a portion has slid off the slanting surface some three feet, to land, broken, on another pointed rock below. Upon this rock I will build. These ants move nest-building detritus, broken bracken & leaf fragments, from the lower wreckage of their city to the upper, to rebuild their labyrinths of underground chambers & grottoes. Maeterlinck, the Belgian playwright , (later, Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck) in his 1930 “The Life of the Ant”, writes of their architecture: “ . . . in the ants’ nest we should find the horizontal style predominant, with innumerable and apparently aimless meanderings, an endless extent of catacomb cities, from which none of us, were they built upon our scale, would ever emerge.”
Maeterlinck ‘s earlier book, “The Life of the White Ant” was a plagiarism of Eugene Marais’ “The Soul of the White Ant”. Marais, a South African poet, scientist & morphine addict killed himself with a shotgun as a result.
All summer I’ve watched them at this task. Today is overcast, threatening rain; the temperature is dropping, but still there are ants walking backward up three feet of bare rock overhang. I track one: she’s hefting a fragment of dried bracken four times her own length, as she ascends, never pausing, scaling a height thirteen hundred times her own: her height, since she is female & since I have seen others almost standing erect, caressing each other with their antennae, communicating what’s unknowable to me. The three feet of the rock, though, isn’t much when considering that most of their foraging is done in the birch & oak canopy many times this height. Here they milk sap-feeding bugs, like the aphid Symydobius oblongus, of their honey dew, which is drawn down by a gentle stroking; the honey dew, rich in sugars & vitamins, is the aphid’s natural waste matter. This aphid is lovingly tended like any prize buttermilk-rich Highland cow. The ants, as well as farming aphids, tend their pastures. They prey on herbivorous insects, sawflies & moths, which, unchecked, could soon deplete the tree pastures they feed on.
This climbing ant, in four minutes, as near as I can tell, has reached the upper city & disappeared into a newly made doorway, away from the prevailing rain. For now the rain has started. The queens here are moving into autumnal diapause, stopping their production of eggs, which have been laid unceasingly since their spring nuptial flight. The flying males are allowed their moment of ecstasy, then die. Requiem; then hibernation. I stare out across the bay where the tide is ebbing away. Above, two hooded crows veer lazily away as they spot me. Something unseen, perhaps a heron, shrieks on Eilean Dubh, the black island, one of the two conjoined tidal islands in the Atlantic gate of the bay’s mouth.
On the walk back to my cottage, the rain on my face, I gather enough chanterelles for my supper, together with some deer-nibbled birch bolete to dry for stock. There is a dead shrew, perfect on the metalled road, left to lost unstrung rosaries of sheep droppings.
Inter oves locum praesta, sings Gigli - Grant me a place among the sheep.
(to be continued)
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