Wonders of Wind
- Carys Mainprize
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
by Kerry Morrison
Wind across a peatland can feel relentless at times, blasting into our face and sometimes carrying with it rain, sleet, and snow. It’s an element that can literally move us. It’s also a force that moves others, spiders and insects, birds, pollen and seeds. Wind is an essential element of peatlands, but it is often overlooked as a force for life and creativity.
Continuing to develop events that connect us to peatlands in novel ways, the Wonders of Wind was conceived to celebrate the phenomenon of wind over a peatland: its role in pollination, insect and spider movements and drifts, bird flight and gliding; and as a force that creatively inspires.
With readily available internet articles about the up-sides and down-sides of harnessing wind to generate power, and articles referring to wind as an active agent in the erosion of peatlands (eroding and dispersing bare peat and releasing carbon back into the atmosphere), it’s easy to overlook just how essential wind is for the development and sustainability of peatlands and its driving force within peatland restoration.
The primary peat forming plant is Sphagnum moss. Spores from Sphagnum moss are dispersed by the wind. Each sphagnum stem produces spore capsules that grow up above its feathery head. Initially, the spore capsules look like plump red grapes.
As weather conditions change, becoming favourable for spore release, they begin to shrivel, sucking inwards to create a vacuum. When the weather conditions are right, hot and dry and breezy, the lid of the capsule is shot off, ejecting the spores at high pressure creating a turbulent vortex ring of spore, much like a smoke ring. The spores, fired at 60 miles an hour, are held together in this ring formation, taking the vortex ring above the peatland carpet of vegetation, high enough for the wind to grab them and carry them off over long distances.
Many of our peatbog plants rely on the wind for both pollination and seed dispersal. All the grasses and sedges are wind pollinated, like cotton grass, a peatland indicator species which is neither cotton nor grass; it’s a sedge. The fluffy seedheads, that look like balls of cotton wool, bob in the breeze. Each ‘cotton’ fibre is attached to a seed, which is released as the seed heads dry out in summer, dispersing the seeds with their feathery firmament in the wind, which carries them away.
Then there’s the iconic peatland plant, the sundew; a remarkable tiny carnivorous plant that eats insects. Peatlands are nutrient poor so sundews – and other carnivorous peatland plants like common butterwort - feed on insects to get the nutrients they need. Sundews can self-pollinate while the common butterwort flower is pollinated by insects. However, both utilise wind for seed dispersal. Common butterwort produces a seed pod that splits open at the tip during dry, windy weather, releasing tiny seeds into the air which get carried by the wind. When damp, the pod snaps shut, protecting any remaining seeds until dry and windy conditions return.
The sundew has a sack-shaped pod that enables it to float and fly on the wind and be carried for as far as 10 km. Sundew seedpods are also carried by animals and in water, however, to travel vast distances, they need wind.
Both these plants also benefit from the wind in terms of food - insects. Thanks to the wind many insects can travel great distances - over 500 kilometres! This has important consequences for gene flow and colonisation. Dispersal distances like this mean that insects can end up amongst even the most isolated of habitats, like peatlands, insuring that even the most isolated of plants have the potential to be pollinated, or fed, by insects who have travelled on the wind.
If you are a small wingless insect or a very light inset, it's not easy to get from A to B especially if B is 100 miles over there. Little insects need the wind to get around. Where they fly to, or end up, depends on which way the wind is blowing. Yet, insects are not entirely at the mercy of the wind. Wind speeds vary depending on whereabouts you are. If you’re closer to the ground or amongst vegetation you can, to a degree, remain sheltered from the wind. As most of us will be aware, on a windy day there are fewer irritating insects, like midges, around. Frankly, midges don’t want to be recklessly blown away, instead they stay protected in the vegetation. Insects, in a way, can choose if they want to be carried by the wind or not. That said, wind is vital for insect dispersal and different insects have different take off techniques. The timing of take-off can enable them to take long distance flights. Warm air on a windy day will lift them high into the sky and enable them to travel many miles. But much is dependent upon their willingness to take-off when the wind speed is greater than their flight speed as they ultimately forfeit control of where they go and where they end up, which could be a landing on sticky sundew tentacles. However, those little insects that can fly, can fly at an angle to the wind, marginally affecting their direction of travel which, regardless, will remain downwind.
Fast flying and heavier winged in insects, like dragonflies, are less manipulated by wind, so it's only really the little critters, like mosquitos and midges, or poor and erratic fliers like caddisflies and clegs that get blown about, ending up wherever the wind takes them, which is why these insects tend to lay low in windy weather.
It’s not just insects that travel on the wind, spiders do too. Spiders wishing to travel or migrate produce a fine silk filament, which acts as a parachute that catches the wind and enables them to fly and drift through the air.
Young spiders, spiderlings, do this to get away from their parents and siblings to improve their chances of survival. Spiders will and do eat one another. In readiness to migrate, a spider will climb to the top of whatever vegetation it’s on, for example, a blade of sedge. When at the top, if the wind is blowing, it will lift its abdomen as high as it can and pull the silk thread from its spinneret, in its rear. As it does this, the wind catches the threads and the spider takes off. This spider’s way of areal travelling across a landscape is called ballooning. Ballooning spiders, under the right wind conditions, can disperse hundreds of miles and reach hights as high as 3.5 miles.
On a warm day with wind, up above the peatland vegetation and high into the air, drifting insects and wafting spiders provide a smorgasbord for peatland birds who feed on the wing; like swifts and swallows and nightjars, their flight height influenced by the insects whose height is determined by the wind, air currents and weather. The warmer the weather, the higher the insects and spiders will be. Warm air takes them up. Cool air sinks and takes drifting insets down with it.
Wind is an essential element when it comes to peatland habitats. So many of our peatland species depend on the wind to carry, disperse, and sustain peatland’s unique biodiversity. Wind is also a necessary helping hand in the restoration of peatlands. After re-profiling damaged and degraded peatlands, restoring wetness and hydrological function, and stabilising areas of bare, the wind enables areas of bare peat to re-colonise, scattering and lowering seeds, spores, and insects onto restorations areas.
Holding onto the thoughts of insects and spiders and seeds and spores blowing and lowering in the wind, we end on the note of skylarks. Skylarks don’t feed on the wing, but they do sing on the wind. They soar and hover on the wind and air currents continuously singing their song at high altitude, which drifts pure and clear on the breeze, in the wind, high above our peatlands. With these thoughts, we were led down onto the Upper Urr peatland - a lowland raised bog - by Helmut Lemke to witness an entrancing and playful performance of poetry and movement, sound, and harnessing of wind, taking us into the phenological world of air currents and wind movement.
This event was in partnership with D&G Woodlands and Upper Urr Environment Trust
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