#Geneva

After The Rain, Before The Storm

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The nightly storms that send rain pelting down upon our humble home and illuminate the sky with lightning are impressive. More surprising though, is waking up every morning to blue skies.

It’s not that we aren’t used to wild weather here in the Lake Geneva region; when you live between two mountain ranges, you expect thunderstorms to rattle the windows and drown out conversation.

Big clouds billow and march, rain and hail burst forth from balmy summer skies, winds change direction on a whim and another ‘orage‘ has made its mark.

Roses, pathway, mountains, after the rain

Sodden roses line a local walking path.
Photo: PKR

As I write this a couple of hours after my run in the sun, clouds are already gathering again, the air getting heavier, the wind picking up. Another storm is on the march.

But the weather we are experiencing isn’t limited to our neighborhood between the Jura and the Alps – half of Europe is counting the high numbers of lightning strikes as if keeping score. France saw almost 150,000 recording lightning strikes in May 2018, the most since the collection of that kind of data began in the early 2000s.

It’s not that we’re having more storms, it’s that the storms are having more of an impact. The average temperature in France for the month of May this year was a full degree Celsius higher than last year. Thunder and lightning storms feed on that kind of heat.

potato, crop, flood, rain, summer, running

A nearby field is flooded after the storms. I doubt the crop will recover from this kind of standing water.
Photo: PKR

As for the blue skies: At least where I live, every morning over the past week has dawned bright and shiny as a newly minted coin, as if all that noise over the past night belonged to some other country. Birds are singing, the critters are out, as if we’ve all agreed not to speak of the violent winds and rain. A large dragonfly followed me for much of my morning run, always just out of photo range.

erosion, running, water, thunderstorms, summer

I can only imagine how quickly the water must have been flowing to erode my usual running path overnight.
Photo: PKR

 

Flying ahead, settling, watching me approach, and then flitting off again, further and further away from any pond or river where it might normally live. Of course, the garden flowers are hanging and the glorious peonies of May are lost in aprons of pink petals on the ground.

 

More storms are predicted for the rest of the week…

 

 

mountains, running, summer, thunderstorm, rain

The Jura range behind our village, sunny after the thunderstorm.
Photo: PKR

 

Fling The Stars

/ PK Read / 4 Comments

Several villages in the corner of eastern France where I live have started shutting off town streetlights from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. Until now, I never realized just how much having streetlights had formed my idea of what a community looks like at night.

Last year, flyers were hand-delivered to homes, informing us that streetlights and all public lighting would be turned off at night to save money, to save energy, to reduce pollution (both of emissions and light), and finally, to support the recovery of nocturnal animals.

Being a nocturnal animal myself, I thought this seemed like a good idea. But also, of course, good for the bats and night creatures.

Then, a week or so ago, I was driving home after a night at the movies, and I entered our village of around 1200 inhabitants near the Swiss border. It was utterly dark. I couldn’t see the primary school my daughter had attended, nor the picturesque 19th century post office, nor the 12th century church that has just been restored to its modest glory.

light pollution, streetlights, urban lighting, darkness, stargazing

A local village sign advising caution due to lack of public lighting between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Photo: PKR

More importantly, I didn’t see a large group of teenage boys that was out on the one main street. There were at least ten of them, loping along together through the shadows – usually they would have been easily spotted, smoking under the cover of the lone bus stop shelter. Now, I only saw them at the last moment, jumping onto the sidewalk and off the road in the beams of my headlights.

Light pollution and the energy it takes to power night lighting has been a topic of discussion for years, and numerous cities now require non-residential businesses to turn off non-essential lights after the last worker leaves the building.

Dark Sky Communities, Udsigten, Møns, light pollution, darkness, night time

The Milky Way arches over Udsigten at the Møns Klint Resort on the island of Møn, Denmark, designated IDA Dark Sky locations.
Photo: Thomas Ix/www.foto-ix.de via IDA

But the streetlights? Even as places around the world retro-fit with LED lighting, which is more flexible and energy efficient, I hadn’t seen much discussion about actually leaving residential areas in complete darkness at night. Then I found this, the International Dark Sky Association (IDA), which aims to drastically cut light pollution at night. It has a searchable map for locating reserves and communities committed to turning of the lights.

I get it, and it’s a new line of exploration for me. But for now, if I go out on a moonless or cloudy night, it is to an invisible village cloaked in deep shadow. Light shines from windows here and there, outlining human activity and making it seem smaller. The view of the stars has become breathtaking, but it will take me some time to adjust to the new vision of our night time home.

 

Vehicular Pollination

/ PK Read / 2 Comments

A cold winter and a short spring have left a short window for many species of trees and plants to release wind-borne pollen – so they are doing it all at once. It’s an adaptation for them, and we have to adapt. Part of that adaptation, I suppose, is that all of our vehicles are now purveyors of pollen.

I washed the first batch of pollen off my car less than 48 hours before the image here was taken, and my grey car is already completely yellow again. Pollen. Some types of pollen have a remarkable ability to fold in upon themselves for their flight, allowing them to retain moisture, and then unfold upon arrival in a hospitable destination, ready to reproduce. My guess is that the folding pollen types remain folded on the hot roof of my car, waiting for a better home.

folding pollen, springtime, hayfever

A variety of pollen grains in different stages of folding
Image via ScienceFriday / Slow Muse

This isn’t the first year I’ve seen all the cars turned the same golden color, but it might be one of the most intense. And of course, it’s not just the vehicles. It’s on every possible surface. But then, I don’t generally suffer from hayfever – otherwise, my concerns would be elsewhere.

How many different species of vegetation are represented on the top of my car?

pollen bomb, pollination, trees, adaptation

Pollen horizon: A golden blanket of pollen atop my car.
Photo: PKR

If their pollination season is usually spread over several weeks, and they’ve all released at the same time, what impact does that have on the various animals or plants that interact with them according to a seasonal schedule that has been drastically accelerated?

These are the questions I ask myself as I look out over the dusty hood of my car. Meanwhile, if you are in an area where pollen is carpeting everything, here’s a good article on how to keep those fertile little motes from damaging the paint on your vehicle.

 

 

Dawn or Dusk

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Sometimes it’s hard to tell which it is, dawn or dusk. Getting brighter for a sunny day, or darker for a long night?

How to tell the difference? Obviously, it all depends on the direction you’re facing.

In this case, I was facing east. It was a dawn that was coming up all soft pinks and blues, stenciling the Alps beyond like a cut-out horizon.

Slightly smudgy photo of a crystalline morning of colors and clouds.
Photo: PKR

It’s A Hot One

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The little digital thermometer on my window here in south-eastern France read 50.1°C (122.2°F) yesterday. Today it’s even higher.

55.3°C (131.5°F). I definitely need to move this device. The actual temperature is 32°C (89.6°F).
Photo: PKR

Not that the outside air is really that hot. It’s just the sun heating the glass of the window to that searing temperature. Until I get around to moving the thermometer to a location that offers more accuracy, there’s not much point in panicking about the numbers on the display.

Still, according to Meteo Swiss, yesterday was the hottest day of the year so far in our region, 35.5°C (95.9°F). These days, the announcements of monthly, yearly or all-time heat records being broken beat down with the worrying regularity of a leaky faucet.

It’s not just a subjective feeling that the summers are getting hotter and drier, the winters shorter and warmer. When we moved to this area of high mountains and lakes, winter meant thigh-deep snow at least three times per season. Now it’s knee-deep once a year. And summers?

Hm. Let me go have a look at that thermometer again.

There’s a pretty video making the rounds this week, a striking representation of temperature anamolies over the past hundred years or so, broken down by country.

It starts off as a rayed sphere of blue, yellow and orange, showing average highs and lows above a baseline. By 2000, it’s a pulsing sun of spiky red lines.

Antti Lipponen, a researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, created the visual using publicly available data from NASA earth sciences programs. These are the very programs that have had their budgets cut by 9% under the new U.S. administration, in favor of planetary science programs.

Unlike my window thermometer, this climate data is accurate. Ignoring it won’t make the raw information change, and it won’t change the fact that anyone and everyone with the means needs to act now to make Lipponen’s visual – and our planet – stay in the safety zone.

Summer Field Moment

/ PK Read / 2 Comments

I was out running yesterday and there was a cushion of sound, a papery hum, that accompanied me for a long stretch.

At first I thought it was the standard ambient noise of my run: a bit of mountain wind, shards of birdsong, maybe an underlying rush of water from the creek in the middle of the nearby forest (but only if it’s just rained). And then there’s the busy road at the lower end of our village, and the occasional plane above. It’s a familiar palette.

But this was closer, and I was pounding along and breathing heavily, so the soft crackle carpet of this sound took a while to push through to my awareness enough to make me stop and take a detour into the neighboring field.

I should have known all along. A field of rowdy insect song, full of hidden animals drunk on the heat of a summer morning.

So I thought I’d share it.

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All Abuzz

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A friend challenged me to take nature photos for a week, and it resulted in several very nice shots of our garden, if I do say so myself.

But one of the most enjoyable aspects of the exercise took place when I went to take pictures of the two lavender bushes in front of our house. I planted them a few years ago, replacing ones that had gotten woody and sparse. These two bushes are veritable pollen engines, and the air around them is usually humming.

Photo: PKR

But it was only when I leaned in to take photos that I realized just what a busy miniature ecosystem these two plants have become. There were at least three different bee species in addition to the humble honeybees I usually see there – unfortunately, I couldn’t get all of them to pose for me. Several of them kept insisting on harvesting from lower branches, out of easy camera range.

And then there were the hummingbird hawk moths, the closest thing we have here in France to hummingbirds, at least in terms of size, movement and preferred food source.

Hummingbird hawk moth (Macroglossum stellatarum).
Photo: Wikipedia

There were several other small pollinators, flitting black creatures I couldn’t catch on camera, as well as wasps, which I left alone. And then there are the lizards that lurk on the stone wall and the countless birds in the branches of the climbing vine, all waiting for an easy meal.

Photo: PKR

All this around two lavender bushes, a small world on our terrace. One more argument, if any were needed, on the value of planting for pollinators, even in limited spaces.

Photo: PKR

Running Evensong

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The bad news today was that I spent most of it trying – with the assistance of an electrician and a building contractor – to figure out why the electricity in our house kept going off for no apparent reason. One of those unnerving household events that I’d almost rather attribute to a poltergeist than to an impossible-to-locate shorted cable buried somewhere in one of the stone walls of this old pile we call home.

My morning run got delayed past noon, and then past evening, and then it was nearing sundown.

The good news today was that when I finally got out for a run, the air was still warm and fragrant with the scents of cut grass, the sweetness of wild flowers that line the roads, and this, the evening chorus of birds.

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The run was also punctuated by cowbells, low sunset calls between free-range cattle, a carpet of amorous crickets, and the occasional whoosh of large mourning doves flying past.

The lights in the house are back on, but that’s not what recharged my batteries.

Sly Fog And Moon

/ PK Read / 5 Comments

The Lake Geneva basin is known for its foggy autumns, when weeks can pass beneath a layer of thick brume with little sunshine. And when it breaks, it does so with suddenness. It simply parts like a fragile veil and you realize the sun has been blazing away up there all along.

Our little corner of the region, though, has countless hollows and dips and the fog wanders around as if seeking a new foothold. Even as it retreats, there are unexpected pockets of mist. The first meadow on my running loop is one of fog’s favorite places to play hide-and-seek.

All photos: PKR

Photo: PKR

I know a lot of people here who dread the weeks of gloom. It can be like being lost in an endless down blanket. Sure, you can always drive up a mountain, and literally get your head out of the fog. But who has the time on a daily basis to make the hour long round-trip? Luckily for me, fog is an old friend. Growing up in a foggy region of the California coast, the days and weeks of fog here just make for pleasant nostalgia.

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Moonrise. Photo: PKR

And then there are moments like this one, when the moon rises between cleft in the fog that is still covering Lake Geneva, which lays a bit lower in altitude than our place. It was just a minute or two, a keyhole between sunset and nightfall, but the moon shown brighter than the sun had for many days. It rose into obscurity, but stayed with me for the duration of the run.

Hoarfrost Quietude

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Throughout winter, our little village can often be found directly on the fog line of the milky blanket that covers the Geneva basin for weeks at a time. We are just high enough in altitude (490 m/1600 ft) to catch a glimpse of blue above, not quiet high enough to see out over the fog itself.

Photo: PKR

Photo: PKR

The freezing temperatures and lack of sunlight coat most surfaces with an ever-thickening layer of ice – hoarfrost – as the fog lingers and becomes solid. The garden, the roads, are obscured by a moving veil, with visibility down to a dozen yards or so, and then suddenly, like the revelation of a hidden truth, the fields and mountains and tree-tops reappear.

When the sun bursts through, there’s a brief, wonderful space of time when the hoarfrost falls from the trees and bushes in chiming shards. And the birds, mostly silent in the fog as it’s an eternal evening, suddenly begin to sing again.

I went for a run today at just the right moment. The fog broke, and though I could see the borders of the fog bank just below our own property, above was all soft light. I could hear raucous birdsong, and the gentle tinkling of frost rain.