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May has great eyes

Everything is a first in the yard in May. The first butterfly. The first tick. The first fly. The first day without scarf or cap. The first nightingale – that of course of course sometimes does not arrive. But sometimes the first snow comes instead –first springtime snow, that is.

The first mosquito.

The first flowerbed sown. Best done the Toots way, with many different kinds of flowers mixed.

The great thing with the May-time garden bed is that it doesn’t have to be weeded. Once you have prepared it, watered it, scattered the seeds and then spread a light layer of soil on top of them – a lazy person’s way of making a garden bed –it will take time before anything weedy appears, and you really must not root it out at once, who knows, it might be a flower.

Then of course the first time to mow the grass. But so that the little patches of yellow wood anemones are saved.

The first time at the seashore to see the underwater sand waves like tiny little dunes. The first thunder.

 

In a word, or rather, in three – first of May. As far as the mosquito is concerned, a fist first. The Backyard Potterer’s fist. True, it has been said that there is no point in killing a mosquito outdoors, more will come anyway – but what to do when your hand moves by its own will?.

Interesting – does the mosquito feel pain? The insect people assure that it does not. But fish people protested too that fish don’t feel pain. And now it has been made clear – at least for some species – that they do. It makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. Hasn’t the ability to feel pain developed for the purpose of perceiving one’s own injuries, and to be able to flee from the source of them?

As regards the mosquito the miracle is how it manages to register the smell of a human to attack from such a distance. This has even been studied – true, for malaria mosquitoes. That recognise a person by their smell from 50 metres. And helping here has been none other but the best friend of the geneticists, the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. It is amenable and lives happily in the laboratory and researchers have learnt to manipulate it too. So now a fruit fly has been found with one olfactory receptor missing, and when one from a malaria mosquito was implanted there, it was finally found that for each smell molecule there is not one and one only kind of receptor but that they work by groups.

It was found too that the smell receptors of the fruit fly were most sensitive to fruit smells, those of mosquitoes again to human sweat. Which was after all known before. But this is typical of science – to check what humanity already knows. The scientist is a laboratory man, he isn’t a Backyard Potterer – it may be that he hasn’t even seen a decent backyard, not to speak of malaria mosquitoes outside a laboratory.

 

The eyes have much to do in the courtyard of May. Because eyes need light and there is plenty of it in May. Actually the eye of a mammal sees in twilight too; for this it has its special receptors in the retina. Not only that, even dedicated receptors for the diurnal rhythm are preserved in the eye of man, they originate from a time 600 millions of years back, when the eyes of animals just had started to develop. The human eye evolved into what it is now less than 100 million years ago, and unlike the compound eye of a fruit fly or mosquito it is a camera eye. There would simply not have been room for compound eyes in the head of such a big creature as a human – or carrying it along would have used up as much energy as carrying photo cameras centuries ago.

Well, and then it is asserted that the colour sensitivity of the vertebrate eye has developed for the purpose of seeing animals in the forest better. In order to know whether to turn tail and flee or instead to attack. But what to do with this knowledge when not even with the best of will and however much you get your eyes wide open there is not a single animal to be seen in the forest? They outsmart you.

Oh yes, one more first in May –or really many: the little hills of the water voles that rise like volcanoes, regardless of place, time and space. But the water vole itself isn’t seen or heard, however good a camera your eye might be.

 

The yard finishes its self portrait in May. Its paper and canvas are the tree leaves and the straws of grass, the speedwells and the Hepaticas, marsh marigolds and wood anemones, cowslips and bellflowers, lilacs and horse chestnut flowers. And of course bird cherry flowers. And birds, birds, birds.

How differently coloured the foliage in the crowns of the various trees is in May! The transition from one shade to another is softer than in autumn but more pastel-hued too. As summer arrives, all the colours retreat into a nearly uniform leaf green.

That the various shades of green do not have their own separate names in our language – doesn’t that show the limitations of our thinking? But still – leaf green, salad green, poison green – although these are all compound words. All kinds of words can be joined together but you just try to invent new ones that will become current, will be recognised and accepted for use.