Fretful midges
Peter Quince
After the great gales, which felled a couple of fine old trees in the parish and littered the ground with severed branches and broken twigs, the countryside slipped into a spell of singular calm. The lull before the storm is proverbial, but I always find the lull after a storm more impressive. We went into the woods to replenish the woodshed store of kindling. It was as easy a task as that of the children of Israel gathering manna, so heavy was the fall of dead sticks. As we gathered this winter harvest, the air was still and mild.
A lofty spruce, some two feet thick at its base, had been uprooted and flung to the earth by the wild wind. It had crushed a .line of smaller trees as it fell, and its broken roots reached up towards the sky, as high as a house. But there was a solemn stillness about the scene: no hint of movement in the air, and only a little wren flitting about the branches of the fallen giant. The cool sunlight came through the bare branches overhead, making a pattern of slanting rays. The wood had lapsed into a cathedral calm after its taste of frenzy.
There were dense swarms of midges in the-sunbeams. These too had responded to the sudden change. A day before, when the gale was at its most furious, the air was without the faintest sign of insect life. The wind swept empty across the landscape. Now the thin sunlight stirred myriads of these minute creatures into intense activity in the motionless air. They flickered and gyrated beneath the trees, forming pillars without substance, miniature hurricanes without strength.
They were, I take it, of that species known as Winter Gnats. One is inclined to associate swarms of gnats in the air solely with the warmth of summer, when the swifts screech overhead hawking for their prey; but this is wrong. In fact, one of the quintessentially wintry scenes of the English landscape is of leafless trees and frozen earth, with a low sun picking out columns of dancing gnats in its rays. The hour before sunset, when the atmosphere is still and damp, seems to encourage them most.
Familiar as the 'fretful midge' must always have been in the countryside, there remains something mysterious about its life-cycle and its habits. It is worth watching a swarm of gnats for a
few moments.; their movements are not random and unco-ordinat
ed, but in fact seem to follow pre-arranged rules. Each insect is
'dancing' or gyrating in a set fashion, so that the swarm resembles a tiny universe, with each gnat representing a star or aplanet.
I read that this swarming ritual. is really a mating-dance, with those participating in the swarm being males. The females lurk nearby; occasionally one will enter the swarm, whereupon a dancing male claims her at once and carries her down to the ground for copulation to be completed.
' There is an engaging good sense about the proceedings, for with creatures so exceedingly small it is obviously helpful to male and female alike if the sexes assemble en masse to make their presence more noticeable. Yet, what signal brings them together in the first place, I wonder? Presumably it is some conjunction of conditions of temperature, humidity, sunlight and atmospheric calm which sets the males dancing and summons the females to watch. But it is still odd to reflect that the swarms of gnats in the wood are attending their equivalent to, say, Queen Charlotte's Ball.
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