This Strange Winter: Barn Swallows, Skunk Cabbage, and Alfred Lord Tennyson

They come in like bats. Two black shapes on my periphery, fluttering like a magician’s fingers. I straighten from my shovel — working past sunset again — and watch as they circle our porch light. They land atop the fixture.

Bats don’t do that. I step closer. They leap off the fixture and go twittering into the dusk.

The following evening, they are back. By now, I know that this is the first midwinter record of barn swallows on the Key Peninsula.

The day after that, on a mist-dampened New Year’s Day birding ramble, I find them over a nearby beaver pond. The white in the webbing of their forked tails flashes as they swerve to catch midges. When the mist intensifies, they rest on the barbed wire.

It’s weird. Incongruous. Swallows throng this pond when dragonflies are dashing and bass rising. Across the northern hemisphere, they are old icons of spring and summer, love and distance. They are the sailor’s tattoo: here and gone. They have to stay ahead of where fresh hatches of insects will occur, and they quit our fields long before the fall weather turns. They should be in Mexico or beyond.

Midges have been floating through the days. Moths continue to appear on our windows. Frogs were testing their singing voices in December. Averaged statewide, it was the warmest December on record, according to the Washington State Climate Office, and the fifth-wettest. I can count the number of frosts on one hand.

Elderberries began to leaf out, and nettles emerged. One wild hazelnut kept its leaves into December. Another, leafless, we found in full bloom near Horseshoe Lake during the Christmas Bird Count. Lately, I’ve received reports of a skunk cabbage in bloom and a confused mid-spring flowering rhododendron covered in pink.

If you read my work, you know I don’t find much use for anxiety. Nor do I believe that nature has a perfect ability to work itself out and be fine. Too many basic premises have been altered; too many unknowns triggered. Yes, plants and animals have been around far longer than us and seen some changes over geologic time — I try to learn from them humbly as a naturalist — but it is hard to know what represents an adaptive behavior and what represents true fritzing of systems.

An idea in ecology called the match-mismatch hypothesis says that when the timing of plant events like leaf-out and flowering shift, as has been documented across America, using even Thoreau’s journals as reference, the pollinators and feeders that depend on them may or may not be able to shift their own timings to keep the system, which extends to all levels of the food web, intact.

The incredible diversity of insects is due, in large part, to an array of highly specialized insect relationships with plants. The hatchings and transformations of many insects are precisely timed to specific plants. New research suggests that the sweeping global decline in insect populations — the insect apocalypse — has less to do with all insect species losing numbers and more to do with a loss in species richness. The more specialized and rare insects seem to be dropping out. If so, insect communities are homogenizing toward a smaller number of generalist species.

Is that true here? Do shifting plant timings play a role? Loss of plant diversity? What are these insects the swallows are gobbling, anyway? Are they bonus insects, new arrivals like the winter moth that find our sodden months just right? Are they native insects emerging at radically different times? How does that impact their life cycles? Will they simply have more life cycles, like butterflies in favorable years, or will their eggs or larvae be stranded by summer?

Too many questions are going unanswered. Midwinter barn swallows do appear up and down the West Coast, rare singles and troops without pattern. Rarely do they stick in a place for more than a day or two. Birds have wings. They are more adaptable, month-to-month, than plants.

The great debate, up until the 1800s, was where swallows go in winter. Some held that they migrated south. Some thought they hibernated or clung in torpor on cliff faces. And some swore they flocked to the vast marshes of river deltas and dropped en masse into the water. Look up the English poet Charlotte Smith’s incredible poem, “The Swallow,” for how deeply the mystery was felt.

By the 1800s, when Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote his longing love poem, “O Swallow, migration was rightfully recognized as the answer: “O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each / That bright and fierce and fickle is the South / And dark and true and tender is the North.”

I’ve always thought of us as the dark North. But with Anna’s hummingbirds now wintering here and swallows visiting in December, who knows? For many ducks, geese, loons, and grebes, we have always been the bright South.

As I tromp around during this strange winter, I find the old alternate hypotheses for barn swallows a lot less outlandish. Torpor? Sometimes I see bats at dusk, the silver-haired bats that hide all winter in our woodsheds in torpor and somehow reawaken for a snack when bugs are on the wing. Emergence from water? Just about all of these ephemeral flies hatched and grew up underwater, as wriggling red larvae.

In our flooded pasture, a friend makes an incredible find: a fairy shrimp. These small crustaceans emerge from landscapes worldwide, even deserts, where water ponds. When the water recedes, they enter diapause as cysts and wait for water to return. Fairy shrimp cysts can survive for centuries. They are unharmed by direct UV exposure, complete desiccation, frost, and hypersalinity.

Which reminds me of snowbrush ceanothus, a rare plant on the Key Peninsula that only sprouts in direct sun, traditionally after fire. In the wall-to-wall forest of historical Puget Sound lowlands, such plants had to wait a darn long time for disturbances large enough to sweep away the forest canopy. Snowbrush seeds are known to be viable for at least two centuries.

On the fourth morning, first thing, the swallows greet me as they have greeted humans for millennia. Everywhere they live, worldwide, barn swallows nest under the eaves of human structures. They expanded globally alongside people. They hunt our fields as happily as dogs.

I take a moment to enjoy them. That afternoon, they were gone. The next day, it is no cooler than before, and midges still float about, but the brief visitation by the winter swallows is over, leaving questions in its wake.