HUMMINGBIRDS IN SIBERIA

For the past week we have been having bitterly cold weather. Everything is frozen solid outside, and all of the plants with green leaves have that sad, beat-up, leathery look that they get when it’s freezing. In fact, they’re a good gauge of temperature because as soon as it warms up they start looking normal again. The air is perfectly still, the sky is perfectly clear and blue, The Olympics are perfectly white, and the sun is doing its best to peek over the southern horizon and shine horizontally on everything for a few hours a day.

The winter solstice is only two weeks away, so it’s not surprising that the days are short. What is surprising is all of the dry, cold weather we're having. Normally it’s cool, cloudy, and wet this time of year, but not freezing! Global climate change seems to have turned the Pacific Northwest into Siberia.

The saddest thing of all was seeing a little female hummingbird early this morning trying to drink at the feeder outside my window and realizing that the sugar-juice was frozen solid. I hope she managed to go up the street and find nectar in some of the winter-blooming flowers in the neighbors’ yards, but I’m afraid they were frozen, too. I brought the feeder in, thawed the liquid, topped it off, and put it outside again hoping the hummingbirds would find it before it freezes again. From now on, until it warms up, I’m going to bring it inside at night.

I hadn’t been in the greenhouse for a week, but did venture in there today to check the temperature and see what, if anything had frozen. Amazingly, a lot of my pleurothallids and other small-flowered orchids have burst into bloom! They must be enjoying the cold a lot more than I am. 

[Photos of Fairbanks, Alaska at noon on the winter solstice and a hummingbird at a red plastic feeder just like mine are both adapted from Wikimedia. Trisitella hoeijeri photo is mine.] 

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS AND BLACK PERFUME

In the Pacific Northwest we sometimes get a weather phenomenon called a “Pineapple Express”. It happens when a big current of warm, tropical air blows over the Pacific from Hawaii, and it causes a lot of rain. It usually happens in the winter, during the rainy season, so I suppose it’s actually one cause of the rainy season rather than an effect. The past couple of days we’ve had the unheard-of occurrence of a pineapple express during what should be the start of the summer dry season. Yesterday I read that there was flooding in one of the local shopping malls because the roof couldn’t handle that much rain all at one time. 

When I went out for a run yesterday morning, the air was humid and tropical, with all kinds of wet, green scents that I normally don’t smell in late June. The most striking one was a powerful smell of privet flowers. I don’t know where it was coming from, but it was unmistakable.  Overnight, a bunch of new bamboo shoots have emerged to go with the big new canes that are already growing. I’m afraid the warm, wet weather is going to stimulate the black bamboo even more than it already has been, sending it into a full-on manic phase of uncontrolled growth. I wonder if climate change is going to turn Seattle into Hawaii? The orchids would probably enjoy it. 

Yesterday I filtered the first small trial production batch of Blackbird EdP, and was a little surprised at how dark it is. I did use real blackberry fruit products, but didn’t realize how intense a color they would produce even in dilution. The other strongly colored material that I used is fir balsam absolute, which is dark green. Together they produce a juice that is near-black, at least in the Boston round storage bottle, about the color of a Cabernet Sauvignon, but more transparent. I hope it will be lighter colored in the thin spray bottle, but I also modified the formula to make a “Backbird light” (literally light), thinking that most people are probably scared of dark-colored perfumes. Fortunately the dark juice doesn’t color or stain my skin, but I worry about light-colored fabrics. I don’t want to ruin anyone’s expensive, white, designer shirt.

I’m happy to say that the light version smells pretty much like the dark one, at least in the concentrate, which is still quite dark. I haven’t seen the light version in dilution yet, so don’t know how much of an improvement it will be, but I’ve still got almost two weeks to decide which one to go with. I suppose that if Serge Lutens can do purple perfume, I can do burgundy, and it would be in keeping with the Blackbird theme, but I may cautiously settle for dark pink. 

[photos from Wikimedia. The flooding river photo shows one of our local streams during a pineapple express] 

FOOD, FRAGRANCE MATERIALS, AND THE FUTURE

Living in the dense, damp, obscenely green Shangri-La of our sheltering mini-rainforest, it’s hard to imagine that all is not right with the world.  However, all too often these days I read articles like this one, describing how we humans are creating conditions that will lead to a future crisis, probably within our own lifetimes, or at least those of our children, sending humanity the way of the dinosaurs in the worst case scenario, or into some chaotic end-of-the-world bad science fiction movie scenario in the best case.

The polar caps and glaciers are melting. The last time I flew over Greenland, most of the land was brown instead of white as it used to be, so I’ve seen the evidence with my own eyes. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reportedly reached the highest level since humans have been on this planet, based on what current science can estimate from the historical record. The article I read this morning predicted that there will eventually be a massive collapse of our food supply due to drought, crop disease, and other factors.

These predictions are not bad science fiction, they are evidence-based and credible. Food is pretty low on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, so a struggle to obtain food would presumably eliminate most higher-level activities, including perfume-making. On second thought, maybe perfume would become more important, in order to mask the unpleasant odors of life in a chaotic society. Spices could once again be an important currency, with wars fought over them. Highly spiced food is more satisfying than bland food, so people could learn to eat less and not miss the vast amounts of tasteless, mass-produced calories that are currently consumed in the US.

Unfortunately, spices and natural perfume materials depend on the same agricultural conditions as food crops, so the factors that lead to disruption of food production would simultaneously lead to disruption of fragrance material production. In fact that is happening now. Sandalwood, rosewood, and agarwood are just about gone. They’re being farmed to some extent, but it’s a slow process, and one that could not be sustained in the face of major alterations in the world’s climate.

I don’t know what the solution to the problem is, and I’m not even sure there is one at this point other than to let nature take its course and restore homeostasis to the earth through means that will be, at the very least, unpleasant to humans. What each of us can do, in our own small way, is to think before engaging in unnecessary use of resources and the accompanying depletion and/or pollution of the environment.

The most egregious example I’ve seen recently was a mother in our neighborhood who parked her hulk of an SUV by the school bus stop, motor running, waited for her child to arrive, and drove him less than 200 meters to their house. I stopped my run to watch the unfolding of this real-life scene that would have been unbelievable if presented as a comedy skit. If people would stop engaging in this sort of absurdly lazy behavior, it would at least be a start in the right direction. 

[Photos of Texas dust storm and dead corn adapted from Wikimedia]