(Minoan mural on Crete of swallows and lilies)

It’s been about eighteen millions years since the volcano Lepetimnos spit out fire for the last time and created the landscape of North Lesvos. Since then, with his two summits, the Vigla (968m) and the Elias (938m) he keeps watch over the island. Now on one of the summits there is a little chapel that leans into the winds, but in ancient times, on one of the tops was a famous observatory and from there the astronomer Matriketas studied the skies and the weather. 

The philosopher Theophrastus (371 -289 v.Chr.) was born in Eresos and was one of the ancient scientists who referred to Matriketas and his observatory, apart from that nothing is known about this star watcher, nor what his lookout tower looked like. 

Contrarily, Theophrastus left a lot of traces and is also called the father of biology because he was the first to try to describe the world of plants. You may wonder where they found so much time to observe, to study and to write, because just like his teacher Aristotle, Theophrastus also wrote about many other different matters like music, health and politics. One of his treatises is a manual for predicting the weather, this way he also can be seen as the very first weatherman in history. Lots of his tips are still used by the farmers. 

People living in the country never had weathermen or weatherwomen and used a do-it-yourself method to predict the weather. They looked into the clouds and sunsets and observed animals and they were pretty good in foreseeing approaching rain and droughts. Nowadays we only know there will be rain when black clouds are darkening the sky and even then it’s not sure if that rain is going to fall. Here on Lesvos many a rain cloud sails along without even spoiling one drop.

Animal behaviour is a good predictor of the weather. Theophrastus named a large number whose antics foretold certain types of weather: frogs making a racket, toads going for a swim, birds gathering together or chickens looking for lice, were all signs of coming rain. 

Now it is thought that a lot of this animal behaviour and their weather predicting skills can be explained by the fact that certain animals actually hear certain sound waves (sonic sound) far better than humans and they can perceive changes in air pressure. It’s these skills that provide animals with the power to anticipate tsunami’s and earthquakes. And they know when a new season is about to arrive.

In Greece it is the arrival of the swallows that is the biggest herald of spring. A fresco on Crete, from Minoan times (ca 1600 BC), shows flowering lilies and dancing swallows. In ancient times the arrival of these little birds was honoured with a festival on the island of Rhodes. Then the children sang a swallow song as they went from house to house gathering sweets and coins. It is one of the oldest Greek songs to have survived from ancient times. Nowadays, when the swallows return to theirs nests on Lesvos and sit twittering in long rows on the electricity cables or tumble through the air they only meet faces made happy by the knowledge that the King of the Winter is leaving.  

What is is less known is that the cuckoo also announces the Greek spring when he comes back from his winter holidays. When his characteristic ‘cuckoo’ sound trills through the air before March 25, farmers knew that good weather was coming and the cattle can go up into the mountains. 

Once, Gerana, a mistress of Zeus, was changed into a crane by his jealous wife Hera. Before taking off into the sky Gerana grabbed her newborn baby, wrapped it in cotton and flew away with the sling in her beak. Later the crane became a stork and this is how the tales of storks bringing babies into the world originated. But obviously storks also bring spring. More than one village on Lesvos has in their centre a storks’ nest on a building or a chimney. Last week the stork of Kalloni came back to its nest, an event eliciting a headline in the paper: “Spring has arrived!”. 

Low flying insects pursued by birds or bats are a sign of low air pressure and in the Netherlands it would be a  prediction of rain. However, on Lesvos, mosquitos and bees can fly as low as they want but still the summers keep bone dry. Apart from the crickets whose sound is a clear giveaway of how high the temperature is (the more deafening their stridulation, the higher is the temperature), I have no idea what animals can predict a hot summer. But I do not need a weather oracle in order to know that for sure the coming summer months we are going to be hot.