The Fly Trap

by Fredrik Sjoberg

  But the hymenoptera have one quality I understand, almost the only comprehensible aspect of these insects’ peculiar world—they love sunshine and warmth as intensely as I do. Maybe that’s the reason I was drawn to them in the first place. I don’t really recall, it’s so long ago now. Thanks to this characteristic of the hymenoptera, my collection includes thousands of small labels with the date and place of capture, and these comprise a diary of clear and beautiful days, days of warmth, soft breezes and no other clouds than small, puffy cirri, and above this chest of drawers, where twenty bygone summers sleep, there might be inscribed the same words written on innumerable sundials: I count only the happy hours.

  He pulls out a drawer at random and begins to read. The sun beats down, a life unfolds. All entomologists sit like this, for as long as they live. Thereafter, their friends.

  If there were a database, I would only have to search the collector’s name. Or a place. Or both. Now that I’ve come to know him, it would be nice to know if Malaise was ever out here trapping, for example on a visit to Frithiof one summer. The answer is in his collections, available, unfortunately, only to the person who has time to inspect the tiny labels on several million specimens. Just going through the sawflies would be an insurmountable task. You can get answers to simple questions. Did Frithiof Nordström ever capture Macroglossum stellatarum on the island? The hummingbird hawk moth? You can go through that drawer in Lund and learn that the answer is no. And think, “Too bad, Frithiof. It’s flying here now.”

  Of course moths and butterflies are nothing to me. Not like flies. They’re just something you see all the time and notice involuntarily, almost the way you read newspaper headlines. Like birds, trees and wildflowers, the really big, beautiful moths and butterflies are the introduction to nature’s fine print—all the tiny, subtle plants and animals that require enormous expertise to understand. If you see a hummingbird hawk moth just once in your life, you’ll never forget it, and it’s not hard to find out what it’s called. They’re unavoidable, the butterflies on warm, sunny days, the moths at dusk and later.

  Summer nights are a story of their own. You can collect almost anything at night—except flies. A hoverfly at night is as inconceivable as a swallow.

  The only thing I can collect at night is my own thoughts.

  A theory. Some aspects of a person’s fundamental nature are inherited in the usual, prosaic fashion—musicality, intelligence, genetic diseases and so forth—whereas there is no better explanation for others than early childhood imprinting in a particular environment. We needn’t go into it deeply. There is no black and white. The outlines are diffuse. But I think we can assume that certain characteristics of what becomes a person are cultural artifacts rather than the boring, unfair consequences of cast-iron biology. One of these, I believe, is a pronounced romantic temperament. Maybe not completely, but mostly.

  My next observation is equally banal—namely, that we in Sweden have the world’s loveliest summer nights. Even a short distance down into Europe the nights become gloomy, pitch-black conveyances from dusk to dawn. Tropical nights can build into tremendous explosions of downright Cambro-Silurian cacophony when a thunderstorm starts or cicadas celebrate their orgies in the treetops. They’re magnificent, but no more than that. The indescribable sound of the Madagascar nightjar is worth the entire trip, but in the end it is merely interesting and exciting and fun to tell people about later. It doesn’t come close to the endless beauty of a summer night in Sweden.

  Every summer there are a number of nights, not many, but a number, when everything is perfect. The light, the warmth, the smells, the mist, the birdsong—the moths. Who can sleep? Who wants to?

  Most people do, it seems. As for me, I’m on the verge of tears from happiness, and I wander around on the island till dawn and dream and think that summer nights are our most underutilized natural resource. The thought is new, but the dreams and the wanderings have gone on for as long as I can remember. For in the superficially darling town by the sea on the outskirts of which I had my childhood, I was the only kid allowed to run free at night. You can’t send a moth-hunter to bed, no matter how young he is. And my parents were—still are—touchingly unsuspecting people who never even considered the possibility that their little boy did anything but catch moths under the nearest streetlamp.

  I was constantly out at night. I listened for marsh warblers, spied on badgers, stole strawberries and threw pinecones at girls’ windows. Of course I also collected moths, lots of them, and was almost always alone. It was only when I was older that I rode my bike into town and drank like a Polish translator, but that’s not relevant here. The imprinting was already irrevocable.

  Ever since, I have regarded all warmish summer nights as my personal property. Sadly enough, I never have to share them with a lot of people other than Frithiof and sometimes a large toad that lives under the porch and every summer comes out to the corner of the cottage where I hang up a bedsheet in front of the moth lamp. We sit at opposite ends of the sheet as if it were a tablecloth. The toad always catches more than I do. Frithiof tells me how it used to be.

  Of course it’s lonely at times. It would be silly to deny it.

  “When you go to study the insect world, you need to prepare much within yourself as well,” wrote Harry Martinson, and the first thing entomologists must prepare themselves for is loneliness. I imagine that’s why the typical entomologist concentrates on butterflies or moths. Enough people know enough about them to make that activity more or less meaningful in a social context. Finding people with a similar bent is not impossible, and even if the collector usually has to work alone, his finest finds are so pretty that anyone at all can understand his pleasure and share it. Everyone knows what a death’s head hawk moth looks like, or a swallowtail. OK, not everyone, but enough to satisfy the collector’s need for companionship.

  The fly expert, on the other hand, usually plugs away in vain. For me, a Doros profuges is like a death’s head hawk moth, but for almost no one else. A mass invasion of Eristalis similis is a sensation. How many people were there who even noticed? Five?

  To be sure, there is a forum on the Internet that links people with similar interests all over the world, but ever since the Americans bombed Serbia I have the feeling it’s being censored. In any case, the discussions have become less interesting and too narrowly scientific since then. That’s too bad, because it could have been a breathing hole for us amateurs, too.

  It was in March 1999. The bombers were fuelled and ready at their bases. They were all just waiting for the order to take off. And then a message appeared on the fly forum website from one of Europe’s leading hoverfly experts, a Serbian. It was just a short greeting, thanking everyone for their participation at the last international meeting. Nothing political. He wrote only that he was at home waiting for the bombs. And then he wished everyone good luck in their lives. That was all. The next day there were expressions of sympathy from his friends in other countries and for a moment it really felt as if we were connected. But on day three there came a message from one of the really big men in the field, from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He wrote that we should all settle down, stick to the subject of insects, and keep politics out of it. (Although his was the only remotely political message.) Anyway, that was the end of that. Global conversations in open forums are rarely very rewarding, not even about flies.

  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, teem
ing, 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.