Time is the fire in which we burn

 As Dr. Soran said in Star Trek: Generations quoting a Delmore Schwartz poem – “Time is the fire in which we burn”. It is this quote to which I have been drawn this week. With my master’s studies fully completed I now find myself with the time to return to processing the vast quantities, I have assembled regarding my patch.

Hazel Trees I planted 8 years ago as whips

I have visited my patch and recorded every bird and animal species nearly every week for twenty years. In 2014 I started a long-term camera trapping project that has now expanded to include two further cams – otter cam and badger cam. This produces sometimes up to 1000 images and video clips a week to process. Alongside this, I record some environmental data, this year including water quality information.

All this data is compiled first in rough on paper, it then has to be transferred to my database and then Excel spreadsheets for detailed analysis. I have cut some of the work down by only fully analysing the data on a five-year cycle but even then I rarely have time to go into the statistical analysis I would like to.

I have spent the past few weeks updating the spreadsheets and graphs for my trail cam information. It was while I was looking at the Wood Mouse data that I started to see the telltale sign of the standard population oscillation trend reminiscent of the work of Lotka-Volterra. I began to wonder if I could correlate the data against those of Tawny Owl and Fox and see if the patterns matched. I realised then that these cycles represented generations of mice. A Wood Mouse has a life span of perhaps 12-18 months in the wild and so the mouse I saw on the camera was certainly not the same individual I saw in my first video recording.

Life is fleeting, I recalled, VGY and ZTG the first pair of swans at the Mill who were so familiar to me that they would come to my whistle, the now long deceased and Half-Tail the resident old Dog Fox who vanished two years ago, and the fat badger that was blind in one eye. In 20 years, individuals had come and gone and recently I have struggled to identify individuals to the same level. Life is hard, little Huey the hedgehog who I wrote about in the last post died of parasite infestation during the week.

20 years may seem like a long time but looking at the data it’s still not enough yet to identify meaningful population trends, not with such a small sample size as just me recording. Even if I recorded for another 20 years which health providing is possible, I am still not certain I would have enough data. You see more data is never enough, you just need more. The more you get the better its quality. Of course, by sending in my records to the local Ecology Unit and Birdtrack means my effort is reserved for posterity but I won’t be around to see what comes next.

I look at the landscape of the mill and I can look at the trees I planted, like the cluster of Hazels that now actually look like trees but at a larger scale I contemplate the course of the river. It’s clear from the topography where the river used to run and where it runs now, but that was thousands of years of change and there is no chance that I will ever see any natural change in the course of the river. I sit beside huge plane trees at the pub recalling that they are evident in the pictures taken in the late 1800’s.

We species each have a life span, an allotment in time, and it’s up to us to make the most of it. If I were to be an oak tree and see 500 years, I still would want to know what happens next, that’s the curiosity of human nature and so I must content myself with my allotted span and make the most of it. I may never complete the data because it never will be completed but I can have fun watching the annual cycles and remember that the fragility of life is the very thing that gives life purpose.