False nightfall

California has been burning for almost a month now. Wildfires rage up and down the state, and it seems that new ones pop up every day. I haven’t bothered looking up the latest stats on acreage destroyed because, frankly, it would be too depressing. All across social media today people posted photos of orange skies that made everything and everyone look kind of sick. The photo above was taken at 17:10 this afternoon, a full two hours before sunset.

There’s a thick layer of smoke blanketing most of California for weeks now. Over the Labor Day weekend the smoky conditions combined with a record-breaking heat wave and made for widespread misery. Fortunately for those of us on the coast, the marine layer returned yesterday and brought cooler temperatures. The marine layer creeping in from the ocean is also acting as a buffer between the smoke and us, keeping air quality at ground level pretty nice. People even a few miles more inland from us are still suffering from dreadful air quality.

The double layer of fog and thick smoke has resulted in the twilight we’ve had all day. I noticed that the wildlife responded to these unusual conditions.

• The cats have been sleeping more than usual, even for cats. They’ve been sleeping like we’re near the winter solstice rather than on the sunny side of the autumn equinox. And I’ve also been very sleepy all day. Like the cats, it feels like mid-December to me, too.
• Hummingbirds—During the heat wave they didn’t visit our feeders much, I think they were trying to shelter out of the heat. Yesterday and today they were feeding frantically. They normally visit the feeders occasionally throughout the day, and in the hour before and after sunset they tank up before going into torpor for the night. The hummers and all of the other diurnal birds have gone to bed a good two hours before sunset.
• Insects—The nighttime cricket serenade is going full-strength. They normally don’t start up until full dark. Tonight they’ve started a good few hours earlier.

None of us knows how many days like this we’ll have before the skies clear again. It is very unsettling, to say the least. Now imagine the same kind of thing, only more pronounced and lasting for decades or centuries, as would have occurred during periods of extreme volcanic activity in Earth’s history. After today it’s a little easier to understand at a gut level what I already knew at an intellectual level, that severe levels of atmospheric smoke and dust can change the biota: if the sun never gets brighter than it did today then plants would die, resulting in altered community structure.

As I finish up this post, it is now about the time that the sun should be setting, and it has been full dark for well over an hour now. Feels like bedtime!