In my mind’s eye, I see Olavi Sotavalta lying on his back in his grey-green sleeping bag somewhere in the bright summer nights of northernmost Finland, maybe on the shore of Lake Inari, smiling to himself as he listens to billions of hums from the space around him, thin as filaments of mica.
But I was going to talk about disguises, about the art of mimicking a bumblebee. We all know why. Profitability. Birds like to eat flies but usually avoid hymenoptera, which can sting. And so nature’s perpetual arms race has formed masses of harmless flies into lifelike reproductions of all sorts of unpleasant things. I don’t know why hoverflies have become such superb impostors, but that’s what’s happened, just as surely as the sun was shining from a clear blue high-summer sky one day when, at the very beginning of my career as a fly expert, I stood on watch in a clump of bishop’s weed in bloom. There were insects everywhere. Pearl butterflies, rose chafers, longhorn beetles, bumblebees, flies, all sorts. And me, of course, wearing shorts and a sunhat, armed with the blissful thoughtlessness of the trigger-happy hunter and a short-shafted, collapsible tulle net of Czech design.
Then, suddenly, a coal-black missile came in from the right two metres above the nettles. I had just enough time to think “stone bumblebee,” no more, but within a fraction of a second I also thought I sensed a strange lightness of behaviour. Very subtle, barely perceptible, but the very suspicion released a reflex backhand sweep of my net.
That catch came to be my ticket of admission into hoverfly high society.
But first, a more comprehensive setting of the scene. We’ll need to take this from the top. And what better place to start than with a description of how the hunt takes place. We are all familiar with the conventional image of the entomologist as a breathless twit rushing wildly across fields and meadows in pursuit of swiftly fleeing butterflies. Quite aside from the fact that this image is not entirely true to life, I can assure you that it is utterly incorrect when it comes to collectors of hoverflies. We are quiet, contemplative people, and our behaviour in the field is relatively aristocratic. Running is not necessarily beneath our dignity, but it is in any case pointless because the flies move much too fast. Consequently, we stand still, as if on guard, and moreover almost exclusively in places with blazing sunshine, little breeze and fragrant flowers. Passersby can therefore easily get the impression that the fly-hunter is a convalescent of some kind, momentarily lost in meditation. This is not wholly inaccurate.
The equipment is not remarkable. Net in one hand, pooter in the other. The latter is a sucking device consisting of a short, transparent fibreglass cylinder with corks at both ends. A plastic tube runs through one of the corks and a long hose through the other. The tube is pointed carefully at sitting flies, the hose is held in the user’s mouth. And if he can get close enough without scaring the fly, a quick intake of breath is all it takes to suck it into the fibreglass cylinder. A fine-mesh filter in the rear cork prevents the animal from continuing on down his throat. Answering constant impertinent questions about his sanity is, however, unpreventable. Believe me, I have heard every conceivable insinuation and witticism along these lines. So I know from experience that the only way to cool off the grinning idiots is with an unexpected demonstration of the third piece of equipment—the poison bottle.
With the casual ease of a man of the world, I haul it out of my pocket and remark, truthfully, that I have in my hand enough cyanide to put the entire population of the island to sleep for good. All the cheap grins are then promptly transformed into respectful questions about how in hell a person gets his hands on cyanide, which I never reveal. Many experts use ethyl acetate, others chloroform, but I prefer cyanide. It’s more effective.
Almost three hundred people live on the island.
The big black fly flapped about and died quickly in the poison fumes, and since this occurred during my first summer of fly catching (we had then lived on the island for ten years), I didn’t know right away what species I had captured. I could see it was a hoverfly, that’s something you learn in a few days, but it was only later that day, at the microscope, surrounded by teetering stacks of books with titles such as British Hoverflies, Danmarks Svirrefluer and Biologie der Schwebfliegen Deutschlands, that I realized it was a rare Criorhina ranunculi.
The very next morning, for the first time, the island received a visit from the country’s foremost expert on the Syrphidae, the hoverfly family. He examined my trophy sceptically but then brightened up, questioned me at length about the place of capture, congratulated me and then, over coffee, related the following history.
Of all the hoverflies in the country, Criorhina ranunculi is not only one of the largest and most beautiful, it is also so rare that in the early 1990s the decision was made to list it as extinct in Sweden. At that time, it had not been seen for sixty years. The total number of sightings was three: two in Östergötland and one in Småland.
My newfound friend paused for effect and poured a dollop of milk into his coffee cup. The swifts cried, a great loon was fishing out beyond the dock, and far away I could hear taxi boats in the strait that divides the island from the mainland. It was a hot July day.
The species was seen for the first time in 1874, in Gusum in the province of Östergötland. The man holding the net was no less a personage than Peter Wahlberg, the man who succeeded Berzelius in the post of permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in the eventful year 1848. After a long life in the service of research as a botanist and professor of materia medica at the Karolinska Institute, he had now worked his way up to flies, which strikes me as reasonable and logical considering the fact that back in 1833 he was one of the founders of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, later dissolved. He was probably a happy man. His portrait in the encyclopaedia suggests as much. His younger brother, on the other hand, looks mostly angry, as if he suffered from toothache or poor finances. His name was Johan Wahlberg and he was more the adventurous type, known to posterity as an African explorer, big game–hunter and manic collector of articles of natural history. He died before his time in a fight with an elephant.
The next time Criorhina ranunculi turned up was in Korsberga on the Småland plateau. That was in 1928, the collector was Daniel Gaunitz, and four years later another specimen was caught in Borensberg by his brother Sven, later the author of a series of informative articles including “The Old-House Borer in Mariefred” and “Coprophiles of Åtvidaberg.” There was a third brother, too, named Carl Bertil. They came from Sorsele. All of them wrote books, mostly about insects.
Anyway, after Borensberg, Criorhina ranunculi vanished for a generation, until the man across the table from me on the terrace managed to find a couple of specimens on the western outskirts of Stockholm. My fly was in any case the sixth one ever seen in Sweden. It was my first triumph. Since then, I and others have seen the species many times, either because it has become more common or, more likely, because we have learned more about which flowers it visits, and when, and what kind of rotting deciduous trees its larvae cannot easily survive without. And how to distinguish it from a stone bumblebee.
The real difficulty turned out to be explaining my happiness to the uninitiated.
In his short story “The Man Who Loved Islands,” D. H. Lawrence writes:
The years were blending into a soft mist, from which nothing obtruded. Spring came. There was never a primrose on his island, but he found a winter aconite. There were two little sprayed bushes of blackthorn, and some wind-flowers. He began to make a list of the flowers on his islet, and that was absorbing. He noted a wild currant bush, and watched for the elder flowers on a stunted little tree, then for the first yellow rags of the broom, and wild roses. Bladder campion, orchids, stitchwort, celandine, he was prouder of them than if they had been people on his island. When he came across the golden saxifrage, so inconspicuous in a damp corner, he crouched over it in a trance, he knew not for how long, looking at it. Yet it was nothing to look at. As the widow’s daughter foun
d, when he showed it her.
Chapter 3
A Trap in Rangoon
Many years ago, before the island and the theatre, I took a passenger barge up the mighty Congo River. What an adventure! What stories I would tell! About freedom! But it didn’t happen. I never managed to say much more than that the forests were vast and the river as broad as Kalmar Sound. And that I’d been there. So it goes when you travel for the sake of something to say. Your eyes go weak. All I could have written were endless disquisitions about homesickness. So I kept my mouth shut.
It’s a different story with Ladäng Creek, I thought aloud to myself one morning among the bird-cherry blossoms. Then something remarkable happened.
I was in the process of rigging up my big California fly trap between a couple of over-blooming sallow bushes down by the creek—a complicated manoeuvre—when suddenly a complete stranger appeared as if from nowhere. He just stepped straight out of the lush June greenery and addressed me politely and apologetically in English. A wood warbler sang its silver song somewhere in the trembling crown of a nervous aspen, and a pike splashed in the shallow water of the creek. The mosquitoes were stubborn in the shade. He said it was me he was looking for.
“I’m looking for you” were his exact words.
I tried to accept this as the most natural thing in the world, as if strangers could be expected to seek me out wherever I might be. But I failed completely. Instead I stood there like an idiot among the sedge tussocks, amazed and speechless.
This man was in fact, and still is, the only person I’ve ever encountered by Ladäng Creek. If you want to be left in peace, it’s a good place to go. Islanders never go there, and the summer people don’t know the place exists. The paths that once led there have now vanished. The name of the creek is not even on the map. For that matter, it’s not much of a waterway, more of a ditch—overgrown, silted up and periodically dry. The meadow barns that are said to have stood there are long gone, as indeed are the meadows. Slowly but surely they’ve been invaded by fir, aspen, birch and alder. All the same, it’s a very pretty place, as rich and spacious as a cathedral when the marsh marigolds bloom in the spring. Deer meet down by the creek, sometimes moose, but never people. Except that day.
In the Middle Ages, Ladäng Creek was the channel boats used to sail to a village at the far end of the bay, which rising land elevations eventually turned into a freshwater lake. The village is still there. It’s where we live. How old it is no one knows, but there were probably people living here as early as Viking times. The inner parts of the long bay, where the humus-brown water is very deep, must have made an ideal harbour—a sanctuary that seafarers with base intentions surely hesitated to venture into. The granite cliff drops straight into the water. The village was easily defended against attackers from the open ocean to the east.
What ships anchored here outside my window? Who rowed up the creek where today a pike can hardly make its way?
“I’m looking for you.”
Who had told him I would be right here? How very strange. Why hadn’t he called first, as other people do, or at least sent a letter or an email saying he wanted to arrange a meeting? A fly person, of course. News travels fast and globally in our line of work. Criorhina ranunculi has not yet been observed in England, and Blera fallax is a rarity, a fabulous creature that collectors there can only dream about. Here it is not uncommon. There is no shortage of reasons. It struck me that maybe it was my seven specimens of Doros profuges that explained my standing here eye to eye with a fully equipped Englishman, complete with an oilskin coat of that indeterminate colour favoured by military quartermasters. Middle-aged, balding, foolishly bareheaded, waving his arms like a semaphore.
As mentioned earlier, the mosquitoes were annoying.
But in that case, I thought, he’s come way too early. Doros doesn’t appear until the first week in July. If we’re lucky, that is. Sometimes it never appears at all.
The Englishman then initiated a conversation that gradually dispelled my questions—and left me embarrassed at my own presumption. But to start with, the whole thing grew even stranger. He stepped towards me across the mud with a book in his hand that quickly revealed itself to be a well-thumbed copy of Stockholmstraktens Växter, a guide to the plant life of the Stockholm region, published in 1912. As if it were a perfectly natural continuation of his puzzling opening remark, he approached me eagerly with the book opened to a page showing local trees. And it was only then that I realized it wasn’t me he was looking for, and that what he had said was not “I’m looking for you,” but rather “I’m looking for yew,” a tree that, according to his guidebook, grew “abundantly” on this island.
I’ve run into any number of strange botanists over the years. It’s usually orchids they’re searching for—lady’s slippers, red helleborine, marsh helleborine. And they get lost. Especially if what they’re looking for is white adder’s mouth, not to mention the musk orchid, which no one has seen on the island since 1910, when Sten Selander, a botanist and member of the Swedish Academy, found a single specimen. I have answered their questions, sometimes a little evasively in order to save the orchids from getting trampled to extinction, but this one was new. So when I had told the man where the island’s yews might be found, I ventured to ask how it was that his curiosity had taken such an unexpected turn this lovely summer day.
“Why yew?”
“Well, you see,” he said, and went on to explain quite openly that he was freelancing for a French pharmaceutical company that had assigned him to investigate this and other areas of Northern Europe for the possibility of harvesting taxol, a substance found in the inner bark of the yew, which has shown itself to be an amazingly effective agent against various forms of cancer. I knew quite a bit about taxol from a book I had translated—enough to have quite a satisfactory conversation about it. Moreover, I could tell him with great certainty that the yews here on the island were too few and too frail to be of use. He was looking for large stands. There were none here. The Baltic states might be worth a look, I suggested. (It was just a guess, plucked from thin air.) The man listened attentively as he waved his arms. Yes, he was on his way in that direction. By way of Gotland, if I understood him correctly. Then we talked for a bit about ferries and about the weather before he thanked me for my help and walked on, to the southeast, towards the limestone outcroppings by the mouth of the creek. An odd man. And the last thing he said was as remarkable as the first.
“By the way, it’s a large one, your Malaise trap.”
Say what you like about Englishmen, but they are often cultured people. In the course of our brief conversation, we had not touched upon what I was doing there in the undergrowth by the creek. We had not said a word about insects. Of course he had noticed my hand net, but unlike all my fellow Swedes, he had clearly seen it as no more than a perfectly natural part of what a gentleman is expected to carry with him when wandering field and forest. He had not felt the need to ask questions. How pleasant! His comment about the trap was merely an acknowledgement. He did not ask what it was, not even if it was a Malaise trap. Simply observed in passing that it was large.
That was the last thing he said. And I stood there in the sedge, as noted earlier, quite speechless.
…
The point is that he was right. My fly trap is American and for that reason so disproportionately large that my friends on the mainland were under the impression that I had purchased a party tent. The model, called the Mega Malaise Trap, is six metres wide and three metres high. In addition, it has double collecting vessels. A real monster. A more effective trap does not exist.
For a long time, I wouldn’t hear of it. In the early years, I was openly hostile to traps of every kind. There was something unsportsmanlike about them, something greedy, and moreover it seemed to me that anyone reduced to using a trap was missing the more poetic dimensions of fly-collecting—anticipation, repose and slowness.
“I’m no industrialist” was my usual reply whe
n asked why I didn’t get myself a Malaise trap. I didn’t even like to use yellow pan traps, that is to say, shallow yellow bowls of water in which flies drown because they’re so dumb they think everything yellow is a flower. Even today I have a certain contempt for this simplest of all traps, which requires no talent, just patience in the sorting out of hymenoptera, beetles, butterflies and all the other poor creatures that keep the flies company in this quickly disgusting soup of disappointed nectar seekers.
But however it happened, the Malaise trap began to excite my imagination. Wherever anyone deployed one, even if it was only on a marsh in the trackless wastes of Lapland, remarkable hoverflies turned up. So what might not turn up here? Species whose existence on the island I’d never dreamed of might allow themselves to be captured in this way, of that I was convinced. And since it was getting harder and harder to find new thrills, my resistance weakened. When you spend two weeks in a row standing like a statue in a spirea thicket without seeing hide nor hair of an unfamiliar hoverfly, you start to think. You think, for example, about the insects you’re missing because they don’t exist right here, right now, or because they just fly past like untouchable meteors. A Malaise trap, you think finally, might at least be an interesting experiment.
The Fly Trap Page 2