The Fly Trap (12 page)

Little by little, our correspondence came to resemble those scanty concerts you can sometimes hear on an early-spring evening when three or four pygmy owls sit whistling to one another. They’re far apart but still close enough to clearly mark their territories.

And so we help one another as best we can within the country. I have two friends who know more about hoverflies than I. That goes a long way. As soon as I catch something worth shouting about, I notify them and they always send me back an e-mail with congratulations and an adequate pinch of envy. And then there are all the other entomologists who know less about flies than other insects, but they often know enough. They understand the thrill. The way Frithiof does, and Sten, René, Harry and all the others who are dead but nevertheless still here.

Chapter 11

The Fly Tree

There was once a giant tree, in Ronneby of all places, that Linnaeus in his writings called the Fly Tree. In fact it was called that long before Linnaeus. Its history can explain why we search and search for certain flies without ever seeing them—the legendary insects, as I think we might call them.

I am speaking now of the almost mythical hoverflies—large and beautiful—whose larvae pass their days in water-filled cavities high in the crowns of trees. You can spend a lifetime searching for them, so rare are they.

The Fly Tree was one of the largest trees that ever grew in Sweden, a black poplar that dated from the Middle Ages. Until 1884, it rose above the courthouse by the Ronneby River like a grey-green cumulus cloud. The trunk was eleven metres in circumference; the largest of its limbs a good five. An oil barrel has a circumference of about two metres, so you can imagine its size. So gigantic was this tree that the citizens of Ronneby bragged about it as a marvel of oriental dimensions, the sort of thing you put on picture postcards and send off in all directions. There was no one for a hundred miles who didn’t know that this giant was called the Fly Tree. It was an entire ecosystem. For example, somewhere in the midst of this eruption of limbs and greenery, home to entire flocks of jackdaws, was a fork at the bottom of which they found what came to be called a spring. It was undoubtedly filled with the larvae of the legendary insects, although that was not how the tree got its name. It was called the Fly Tree because every autumn, especially after summers with a lot of rain, the crown was transformed literally into a cloud—of swarming aphids. Clearly, one or more species of gall-generating aphid lived in the tree, in small nodes on leaf stems, and because the whole spectacle was of such unearthly size, and the aphids so cosmically numerous, the whole thing became, over the course of centuries, a recurring annual event, strange and horrible enough to write about on the picture postcards.

Unfortunately, one limb broke in a downpour in 1882, whereupon some boorish bureaucrat in the city got the idea that the tree stood in the way of progress—in exactly what way is unknown. At the same time a rumour began to spread that the trunk was so rotten to its very marrow that the whole colossus had to be taken down. And so it was. The longest saws were sharpened. It’s small comfort now that they were wrong about the rot. The trunk turned out to be sound to the core, and it’s pleasing to note that it refused to be cut down in an afternoon. In fact, it refused to be cut down at all. The Fly Tree withstood all attempts to fell it.

Except dynamite. And that’s how the story ends. They blew it to bits with dynamite. For the sake, alas, of progress.

Some insects are so secretive throughout their lives that only a few specimens are seen in the course of a century, and it may be that one or two hoverflies fall into that category. Another possibility is that they are no longer with us, because the really fabulous trees are gone or anyway far fewer in number.

In our garden on the island we have a number of trees with the potential to grow huge over the years—an oak, an ash, several maples, poplars, alders, birches and some pines, of course, plus a fir by the lake that seems to suffer from some odd genetic disorder that makes it look like a gigantic pipe cleaner. It grows a foot every summer (some mornings it looks like the antenna on a transistor radio), and since it’s in an exposed location, the north wind will probably take it down someday. In the long run, probably only the oak and the ash will survive, but since the oak is no more than maybe a hundred years old and the ash is hardly fifty, it will be a lifetime or two before they attain the right internal consistency.

I’m putting my hopes instead on one of the maples, a pretty tree that someone levelled with the ground a long time ago but that was then allowed to put out stump shoots in peace. Consequently it has eight trunks, not especially thick but all growing in a ring around a hole left by the original stump, now long since rotted away. This hollow is always filled with about a litre and a half of brownish sludge. As if it were a waterhole on the savannah. I sit by it for hours and wait. So far nothing has happened.

There are a number of other stumps where I spend late-summer days, mostly poplars, some of them as tall as houses. Poplars can grow very large, as everyone knows, but they are still rather unstable. They just grow too fast. On top of which their wood is soft enough that woodpeckers can rip a hole in them and nest. Pretty much all of the older poplars on the island have been invaded by woodpeckers, and afterwards the trunk becomes more or less hollow from fungal decay and thus a suitable spawning place for rare hoverflies. In the end, the large poplars grow sort of tired, tip to one side, and eventually fall over. Unless, of course, a storm takes them down first. That happens, especially with poplars, and what remains are giant stumps, which stand for decades and entertain woodpeckers, tawny owls, beetles, wasps, hoverflies—and me.

You can even make good politics out of a well-placed stump. A friend of mine on the mainland did just that several years ago, and as far as I can tell, his opponents haven’t recovered yet. It was the usual stuff. They wanted to scare up a bunch of rare species—lichens, fungi, insects, all sorts of things—to use as brickbats in some tribal war between different bureaucracies. In short, if memory serves, they were asking for money to buy more nature reserves. Something like that. An old story—and a fine idea, except for the fact that the people organizing the whole thing were so hopelessly lost to the idea that “good” nature must necessarily be untouched, or at least look as if it had been clipped from a fairy tale by Astrid Lindgren.

Seven municipalities joined forces and for three years they inventoried almost 500 wild areas of a suitable type. Naturally they found a lot of what they were looking for.

My friend, who is a carpenter but also an inventive entomologist, began a study of his own at about the same time, and in one of the same general areas. His goal may not necessarily have been to hog-tie the army of municipal bean counters, but he did want to remind them that damaged environments, too, can be rich in rare species. So while all the other field workers were tramping about in the wilderness, capturing specimens till they were blue in the face, he put a ladder over his shoulder and walked out to a clear-cut forest where he knew there was a lonely 25-foot poplar stump. He then made an inventory of its insects.

He kept at it for several years, collecting on one stump in a cutover forest that no one else cared to study because it had already been destroyed. Oddly enough, he found nearly as many endangered insects on his stump as all the other inventory-takers together found on almost one hundred square kilometres.

What’s less amusing is that our environmental politics are themselves a natural disaster, tipping over and threatening to fall. Positions are locked and the investments often so great that anyone who makes a careless statement about the legendary insects in the very epicentre of a devastated area must be prepared to make friends they don’t want. But things are never as simple as they look, unfortunately, so when everything is said and done we shouldn’t draw any conclusion other than that some efforts to measure nature are more elegant than others, if not necessarily better. Or at least they’re quieter. As usual, it’s all a matter of context. The stump stands like an island in the clear-cut desolation. And as Ralph says in
Lord of the Flies,
“This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grown-ups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.”

As long as there have been biologists, they have sought out islands to keep profusion from making them crazy. Islands are generalizations of a kind. Explanatory models. And where there are no islands, we have to invent them. If only for the fun of it.

…

Once you’ve developed an eye for them, you see them everywhere—synthetic islands in the archipelago of buttonology. One of the finest is in Rome, or rather
was
in Rome, in the mid-1800s. A defined paradise in the midst of that great, teeming, confusing metropolis. Richard Deakin was the name of the man who invented it. He was a doctor, and let us suppose that he worked hard at his career, hard enough to need relaxation and distraction. We can also suppose that, as a doctor, he knew well enough that opium was no long-term solution. But he needed something, a lifeboat of some kind. I don’t really know, but I’m guessing that’s roughly what happened.

What I do know about Deakin’s life is in fact very meagre. I have tried to do some research, but he is largely forgotten, even in his own country, remembered principally by aged botanists and dusty collectors of rare books with hand-coloured plates. All I really know is that he was an Englishman who, in his free time, studied the distribution of plants. Among other things, he wrote about British ferns. I have no idea how he happened to move his medical practice to Rome. But he did, and he obviously took his passion for flora with him.

In a rare-book shop, I happened to catch sight of his name embossed in faded gold on a wine-red book with the inconsequential title
Flora of Rome
. Aha, I thought, a city flora. Urban biology is in many ways a fruitful subject, tantalizing in its unpredictability, so I opened the book and found to my delight that it was not at all the sort of plant guide I had expected but rather the story of a desert island, a sort of botanical Robinsoniana in an urban setting. Published in 1855. The complete title was
Flora of the Colosseum of Rome; or, Illustrations and Descriptions of Four Hundred and Twenty Plants Growing Spontaneously upon the Ruins of the Colosseum of Rome
.

As I said, the facts are missing, but let us suppose that Dr. Deakin had his hands full at his job. Perhaps he supported a large family. What to do? Long walks on Sunday to enjoy the views was not his cup of tea. He wanted to botanize, to jump from rock to rock around an island and collect plants and then catalogue them.

He solved his problem brilliantly. He made an inventory of a ruin.

He spent his free time clambering about in the Colosseum, happy as a child, and in light of how much he found, he must have been at it for years. He even described an unknown species, a grass that he named
Festuca romana
, and he found flowers that no one before him had ever seen in all of Italy. Since he wanted to share his finds (and himself) with the world, he bottled his childish delight in a book—which, in contrast to many other works in that genre, is still readable. Certain strange species from distant lands give him an opportunity to philosophize about the ruin’s violent history, while others tempt him out into the morass of legends and old folklore where all botanizing authors eventually gather. Nightshade and crown of thorns are plants worthy of their own books. Or
Narcissus poeticus,
which no one escapes. Only Shelley can help Deakin here:

And narcissi, the fairest among them all,

Who gaze on their eyes in the stream’s recess,

Till they die of their own dear loveliness.

I can’t help being envious. What poet writes verses in honour of the narcissus fly? Or of any hoverfly at all? World literature may be full of flies, but they are almost always anonymous—just flies. Hoverflies are mentioned here and there, yes. Martinson does it, Sven Barthel and Chatwin, but never ever are they permitted to step forth from the formless crowd, as species with names and histories. It’s not so strange. Not even I can get upset about it. Just envious of all the birds and flowers and butterflies. Entire libraries abound in them. All of literature.

We show up literally in the undergrowth.

Worst of all, the names don’t even work as names. The fact that hoverfly people use Latin all the time does not make the situation better.
Helophilus, Melanostoma,
Xylota
. In the best of cases, a layperson can get a vague picture of how these small creatures live or what they look like, but usually the names tell them absolutely nothing. It’s all a foreign language, literally. The only really housebroken names are the occasional scientific designations that have their origins in love of the normal, comprehensible kind, that is to say, in cases where the entomologist in question has christened some bug after his wife or maybe his mistress. It’s not uncommon, and then the mists lift for a moment for whoever is listening. The name clings to the material world like a burdock.

“Check and see if he named any hymenoptera after her. In that case, it was true love.”

I’d been asking around about René Malaise, and now I was sitting with a professional entomologist on the line, a man who’d come up with some curious names himself over the years. We’d been talking about Ester Blenda Nordström, speculating pretty freely about why they married. It was then he suggested that I check the hymenoptera. That a marriage of convenience might lead to Latin names was out of the question, he thought, but as soon as deeper feelings were involved, anything was possible. He had himself recently named a beetle only four millimetres long in honour of his wife, so he was speaking from experience.