Two Million Hornets - Dark Mountain

In Ireland, where I grew up, the mountains roll low along the horizon, 
a shadow of their former selves. They are treeless, or planted with industrial conifer plantations, less likely with each year to ever recover their former glory, thanks to the now-acidified soil. The megafauna which found refuge there centuries ago – including wolves and bears – has long been killed off. Today, I look out of my window, and a green mountain shoots up proudly, peaking into jagged limestone. The tallest mountain in Ireland is just over one thousand metres. The one I see just out of my kitchen window as I make my morning tea, bleary-eyed, is taller than that. Venture a bit further east, and you’ll find some above two and a half thousand metres. Cantabrian brown bears roam somewhere up there, sometimes venturing down into our village in autumn in search of fruit. Wolves ghost around this landscape, too. There is much more to mountains than their romanticisation as sites of self-realisation by urban excursioners and Western nature writers. Their natural topography tends to harbour immense diversity – ecological, cultural and otherwise. They are not a backdrop to human activity, or a ‘landscape’ to visit; they are the protagonists, the very formers of experience. For some cultures, they are ancient gods, and it is easy to see why. They are also dark spaces when it comes to surveillance and the state. There is a local joke here that speaks to a pride in resistance to conquest through the centuries: Asturias es España, y lo demás tierra conquistada. ‘Asturias is Spain, the rest is just conquered territory’. There is also some historical truth to it, given the history of struggle against the Romans and the Moors. These mountains are wild places; unconquerable, resilient, hard to govern. The people who have lived here over millennia tend towards the same. Mountain tenacity is a pattern repeated worldwide. When the late James Scott wrote The Art of Not Being Governed, he drew from the experiences of 100 million residents of the high-altitude Zomia region in southeast Asia – geographically the size of Europe – historically lying beyond the control of lowland governments. Maligned as primitive or ‘backwards’, these mountain communities were instead fugitives from Progress – avoiding the taxes, conscription, epidemics, inequality and exploitation that come with modern government. Perhaps a similar history could be written of these northern Spanish mountain communities. It would speak of the conceyu, a form of assembly or municipal self-rule used to govern and administer communal pasture and resources such as collective mills and ovens up until the 19th century. Or it could move to the 20th century, where, in 1934, Asturian mountain villages and mining towns were the epicentre of an armed working-class rebellion, a prelude to the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. Remote hamlets and caves provided refuge to fugitive rebels (huidos) under threat of execution. My wife and I came to ‘Green Spain’ naïve of much of this history, instead seeking a climate refuge. The imposing barrier of mountains separating the northern autonomous communities (Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria and the Basque Country) from the rest of the Iberian Peninsula creates a uniquely damp and warm climate. Apart from the literal move into an unfamiliar high-altitude landscape, my life here is the culmination of a metaphorical journey to the Mountain: a decade and a half of dreaming. A rural stone cottage and a small garden, just large enough to provide the basics. A lemon tree, laden with fruit. An apple tree. John Seymour would be proud. Imagine the dismay, then, when we were faced with apocalyptic conditions in just our second summer – skies darkened for days by wildfires, as summer temperatures soared to unprecedented levels and the mountain landscape turned from green to yellow. Drought caused springs, which had run uninterrupted for centuries, to dry up. The fire service’s helicopter scraped whatever water it could out of the local river to try to contain vast strings of fire across the valleys. Eventually, even the holm oaks clinging to the karst mountain, normally so resilient and used to water scarcity, began to die en masse. In a twist of irony, their dead carcasses caused the landscape to become even more vulnerable to wildfires, and the downward spiral continues. 
It might seem trite or repetitive, but there is no real escape these days from the damage wrought by civilisation. There is no real escape these days from the damage wrought by civilisation I am not the only newcomer trying to get to grips with this landscape. The Asian hornet (Vespa velutina, known simply as la velutina here) has also gained a foothold over the last decade, since arriving, as the story goes, incognito in a shipment of pottery from China. The hornets aggressively hunt local insects and have disrupted honey production at lower altitudes. I have had to put my dream of keeping bees on hold. By late summer, when the enormous hornet hives have matured and they are gorging on fermenting, fallen fruit, you can walk through the landscape and wonder if there are any other insects left. Climate disaster – with its milder winters and scorching summers – enables the hornets to spread. The problems of modernity multiply, feeding upon each other. To confront this plague, our local council organises an annual selective trapping campaign in spring. The aim is to tackle the problem at source by capturing the queens before they have the chance to found a new colony. The council provides a trap – resembling a plastic coffee cup, with a lid that ensnares the hornet but from which other insects can easily escape – and a sweet, fermenting liquid to fill it. This liquid attracts the queen, at which point she exhausts herself in attempting to escape, and eventually drowns. My minor role is to check the three traps hanging in my garden on a weekly basis, empty them, and count the number of queens. This sounds straightforward, but often, just on the day you have to count, there is a live hornet inside, riled up and desperate to escape. In this case, you can wait for it to weaken and drown, or encourage its demise by swilling the contents of the trap around, trapping the hornet below the liquid’s surface. Either way, with up to 30 queens per trap, the result is a fermenting mass of death. I fish out the dead queens with a fork, counting them one by one. Again, easier said than done. What follows is a string of corpses, each entangled with the one beside it, creating a sticky, decomposing mess. In the last eight weeks, I have counted 361 queens. The meagre three traps might sound irrelevant in the face of the growing continental scale of the problem, and perhaps they are. However, a mature hornet nest in autumn can have 6,000 individuals, so potentially over two million fewer hornets will be patrolling our local landscape come autumn. I often feel guilty about participating in this gruesome ritual of death, as virtuous as it might seem in the grander scheme of ecological balance. The hornets have no natural predators here, I tell myself. Humans created this mess; now we need to figure out what to do. Yet the velutina is doing only what it knows how to do; what millions of years of evolution have told it to be correct. Nature is dynamic, and species move and disrupt, including our own. Perhaps both sides of this deathly dance – myself and the queen – are indicator species of sorts, fighting it out in this new territory. But what do we indicate? Unbalance? Adaptation?

Invasion?