The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The mizzus came in today from collecting the daily papers down the hill on the road and said it was eerie. Eerie? I asked. Eerie, she said. No birds chirping, no birds making any noise at all. This afternoon I was up island with a friend watching an owl land in her backyard cedar tree. No crows came flying in to hound it half to death. No robins slammed their bodies up against it. The woods was, well, eerie for lack of cacophony.

My friend mentioned what Karen had said, the birds weren’t chattering away, they weren’t twittering or tweeting, they were silent. It was as if the internet had suddenly gone Dark. The aviary e-mails weren’t rolling in, the news feeds had gone dead, the social network had shut down. It was, okay, eerie.

We’re in a weird meteorological vortex, the high pressure cell off the coast is dragging hot weather up from far down south with temperatures hitting three figures by tomorrow or the next, about 15 degrees above normal, plus, the fires up in British Columbia are raging and now we’re pulling the smoke down here. We can’t see across to the Olympics anymore and Whidbey Island, a mere three miles away, is barely visible. The smell of woodsmoke is everywhere. I wonder if the birds and everything else in the woods is waiting to see if the conflagration is coming.

I tended bees for a short time. If you went into the hives, you smoked the entryway. This sent the honeybees into a fire drill of grabbing up the babies, scooping up honey, guarding the queen and in general, getting ready for the holocaust. Smoke, I imagine, sends a vestigial message to all of us critters out here in the wilderness. Fire is coming. Get ready. Shut up and pay attention.

Course, I don’t really know. Faux science on my part. I could set up some experiments, burn the back woods and see what the creatures behind me do. Run a few double blind studies, crank out the analysis, submit the data, posit a theory. Get some grants, apply to the U.W. science department for some research assistants, see if I could get some sponsors in the corporate world.

But you know I’m not gonna do any of that. I’m going to watch and listen awhile. I’m going to see if the birds stay silent so long as the smoke darkens the sky. I may keep my mouth shut myself. Like Karen sez, it’s eerie.

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