The Red Notebook

I don’t know if it can be put down to global warming or to natural fluctuations in climate, but this is the second winter in a row where it is well into January and the themometer outside my porch has not yet dropped below freezing (minimum temperature so far: 0°C, 32°F).

Interestingly, Gilbert White’s diary entries for 20th January in various years in the late Eighteenth Century nearly all mention the cold weather and snow. Here’s my favourite:

January 20, 1775

Mr Hool’s man says that he caught this day in a lane near Hackwood-park, many rooks, which attempting to fly fell from the trees with their wings frozen together by the sleet, that froze as it fell. There were, he affirms, many dozens so disabled! It is certain that Mr H’s man did bring home many rooks & give them to the poor neighbours.

I assume the rooks were for the poor neighbours’ cooking pots.

White was writing a couple of hundred miles south of (and 800 feet lower down than) my home. If crows were falling from the sky in temperate Selborne, I can’t imagine what it must have been like up here in the Yorkshire Pennines on this day in 1775. Today, however, there’s just a tepid drizzle.

Just like yesterday.

The Berberis dawinii in my garden this morning

The Darwin’s Barberry in my garden is in flower already. It’s supposed to flower from April to May. There’s global warming for you.

Berberis darwinii, to give it its scientific name, was named by William Hooker, after it was first collected in Chiloe, Chile in 1835 by Charles Darwin during the Beagle voyage. The plant later became of interest to Darwin, because it was believed to be self-fertilising (although Darwin correctly dismissed this idea). It is now a very popular garden shrub.

The Berberis darwinii in my garden was a gift from my father, who is a keen gardener. I had asked him for something named after Darwin. The week after my father presented me with the plant, my favourite science writer, Stephen Jay Gould died, so I planted the Berberis darwinii in his memory.

I fully approve of the modern secular practice of planting trees as living memorials to the deceased, but I like to think Gould would have preferred a Berberis darwinii: partly because it is named after his personal hero, but mainly because—thanks partly to my supreme laziness as a gardener—it should soon grow into his favourite evolutionary motif: a straggly bush.

I am sure Gould would have approved.

Another example of Darwin’s being well ahead of the game:

BBC: British species migrate northward

Right across Britain, animals are on the march, moving northwards and going to higher ground as the climate warms, experts have told a major conference…

Chris Thomas from the University of York said the changes fitted neatly with the predictions of climate models. “Species are moving north, they’re climbing mountains, they’re retreating at their southern boundaries,” the professor added.

Compare the above with the situation at the end of a former glacial period, as envisaged by Charles Darwin in chapter 11 of Origin of Species:

As the warmth returned, the arctic forms would retreat northward, closely followed up in their retreat by the productions of the more temperate regions. And as the snow melted from the bases of the mountains, the arctic forms would seize on the cleared and thawed ground, always ascending higher and higher, as the warmth increased, whilst their brethren were pursuing their northern journey. Hence, when the warmth had fully returned, the same arctic species, which had lately lived in a body together on the lowlands of the Old and New Worlds, would be left isolated on distant mountain-summits (having been exterminated on all lesser heights) and in the arctic regions of both hemispheres.

True, unlike in Darwin’s scenario, we aren’t emerging from an ice age, but the principle is the same: our climate is getting warmer and species are on the move. Exactly as Darwin predicted.