Examine any part of the horizon from our garden and you find the air freckled with slow-dreaming swarms of black dots. I’d hazard a guess that all of them are Bibio marci, a fly named because it’s said to emerge on the feast of Saint Mark – 25 April.
All spider webs inspected thus far have contained their remains, but a larger revelation came from some cattle troughs 10 miles from here. The surface film was full of drowned insects. The fly of St Mark is so often a corpse that you could easily imagine that its species’ raison d’être was to exit life as casually as possible. Those many victims, however, hint only at the creature’s astonishing abundance. For the ensuing weeks it will be probably the most numerous macro-organism in our countryside.
It is not just omnipresent in its own black-flecked shape. It’s also there in transmuted form in our first swarm of swifts. It occurred to me that the swifts’ entire return to temperate Europe may be timed to coincide with this fly’s emergence. The starling chicks I hear wheezing in our eaves are presumably fuelling their infant squall with the blood and body of St Mark. Everything that eats flesh, you imagine, is present at the same life-enhancing feast: swifts, hobbies, gulls, starlings, bats, wasps.
St Mark’s flies speak of the unitary condition of nature. They need soil and vegetation in which to grow, but sky in which to breed. They are made of earth but, in turn, they are consumed and converted into heaven-dwelling birds. Life in Britain is one continuous holy cloth, or perhaps – given that we are among the most nature-depleted countries – holey cloth.
Yet our government, surely among the most deliberately anti-nature since the second world war with its new planning regulations, has just inverted this understanding of the living world. It has reduced the outdoor realm to a between-the-ears process, where it has been chopped into little parcels and all parts have been made equal. So a 500-year-old yew or oak can be judged the same, or compensated for, with 500 plastic-wrapped saplings. It has reduced life to the idea of a machine to meet a numerical sense of national wellbeing, invariably expressed as “economic growth”.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
