Richard Mabey - the weather and me

26 March 2013

You are known for books on nature. Why a book about the weather?

The weather is nature. You can't abstract the bits and pieces of the living world from the circumstances and the environment in which they live. Weather is possibly the most important one of those. I also love it.

I am terribly interested in the weather as a social phenomenon. If I was a novelist, weather would play a fantastically important part in any fiction that I wrote. I'm intrigued at the way it affects people: their emotion, habits and their way of life.

The purpose of the book was to find an outlet for a very long fascination with it and to knock on the head this frequent complaint one hears about the British talking about the weather all the time, and this being unimportant. Of course it is important.

How is the weather affecting plants and animals?

It hasn't looked good for the last two or three years. Bleak, cool springs and early summers started in 2011 and we have had a run of them.

However, to date the only really significant influences for the long term have been on the breeding success rates of birds that feed on flying insects.

I'll tell you a personal story that highlights how counter-intuitive nature can be. 2012 was cold, grey, bleak, damp. You would think it would be worst possible weather for barn owls - which I am in love with, obsessed with and addicted to. They can't catch voles when the ground is too hard. They don't fly in wet weather. I feared the worst, but in fact they had the best breeding season ever. Having seen figures for Suffolk, 600 young were raised on a surveyed sample of 200 boxes. It doubled the Suffolk population in one year. It was just astonishing.

Nature can run counter to our assumptions. We much too easily frame the lives of other beings with our own views. We think that if the conditions are bad for us they are bad for them. Sometimes they are but very often they are not. They get on with their business under the radar.

What was the most incredible weather event you have seen?

I've seen a cave-bow which is not really a weather phenomenon. It is to do with internal water mist in a cave.
 
Seeing a sun-dog however was astonishing. I saw this in Norfolk on our boat as we were coming into the setting sun. You get another almost equally bright sun appearing 20 or 30 degrees to the right. It is due to some weird refraction of the sun's beams going through a fine cloud of ice crystals.

More recently I saw some incredible nests of ground-level icicles in the grass and at the bottom of hedges. Formed during that amazing Antarctic night we had a few weeks ago. It was an exquisite cameo.

Are you superstitious about the weather?

It affects me emotionally, which I wish it wouldn't. I don't get presageful or doomish though.

How is the unpredictable weather affecting our bees?

The bee plight is very grim. Normally at this time [March] you expect honey bees to be out and bumbles too. After the harsh winter there aren't many. I know many etymologists and they are reporting zero bee activity. On top of the other problems they are facing their feeding and breeding systems are delayed, and will be affected right through the year.

What can we do to help bees?

Well we can stop killing them for the rest of the year. There are a million theories about the decline of bees. The most important one is that it is a consequence of various chemicals, including neonicotinoids, that are so flagrantly used.

The atmosphere is full of things never tested for their biotic effect, beyond testing what they do to humans in very high concentrations. These are building up along with minute shreds of plastics into a kind of detritus in the environment which will be there in the next 100,000 years.

For instance, the University of Virginia analysed the effect of unleaded petrol on bees' navigation. They found that the exhaust molecules were combining chemically with the odour molecules from forage plants to make incomprehensible products the bees could not use.

Tell us more ...

People have swept pollution under the carpet. Believe me, it is still pulsing under there and more insidiously than it ever was.

This increasing build-up in the atmosphere of molecules which are non biodegradable includes things like fabric conditioner. That is the problem not being addressed. In my view this lack of care is infinitely more pernicious and dangerous than the actual climate change itself.

The great indicators of this damage is the decline in woodland fungi and moss which started to show in the last 10 years. Both have catastrophically declined. The only conceivable explanation are these atmospheric and water pollutants.

Where in Britain can you go for the best chance of good weather?

4-5 years ago I could say Sussex in June and Outer Hebrides in September, but I don't think you can say that now. We are in an unstable weather period - whether it's one of those two-year unstable periods (weather change) or whether it is the bad scenario (climate change) we don't know yet.

Interview by Annabella Macris

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