It’s just another month of unpredictable farming weather
Otherwise, it wasn’t much different from any other months’s weather.
For example, you’d only have to go back 22 years to find as wet a May as last month, and only seven years to find equally low temperatures. It’s only 31 years since May was so windy at Shannon Airport and Malin Head (where a gust measured 78 mph on the 7th).
We had the windiest May since 1986 at many stations, so a tornado wasn’t such a surprise after what the weather has flung at us in recent years.
Early silage makers have been held up, even though the 15 to 23 wet days recorded across the country is only slightly more than the normal range for May of between 13 and 17 wet days. On the plus side for grassland farmers, mean temperatures were a little above normal for the month, even though the low temperatures of the first half made it the coolest May since 1996 at many stations.
But sunshine was in relatively short supply, with 10% to 20% less than the normal in most places.
Hopefully, it will take a few more years of global warming before mosquitoes threaten our livestock farmers in the way they have hit central Europe after widespread flooding on the continent, mosquito levels were the worst in memory last year.
The problem of larger animals, such as cows being killed by mosquitoes, was first reported last year when a farmer in Germany lost five cows after they were extensively bitten by the blood sucking insects.
Farmer Gerhard Scheffer had called in vets, believing that the animals had been struck down by a deadly, unknown disease in the fields in Baunatal, central Germany. Instead, he was told that his cows were the first official victims of the mosquito plague and had bled to death from mosquito bites. Four cows have died this year on a farm in South Tyrol, Italy.
The fight against mosquitoes has become more difficult since scientists discovered a tiny mutation to their genes that has made them immune to insecticides.
Authorities in Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic admitted last year that there was little that could be done about the insects. Holidaymakers in central Europe are being warned about the mosquito plague.
Viennese expert on zoology and water breeding insects, Bernhard Seidel, said the mosquitoes were of a new type that could live in the area because of increasingly warmer temperatures in central Europe.
Biologist Norbert Becker, director of the Communal Action Group to Fight the Mosquito Plague (KABS) in Germany said the plague will have long repercussions, as eggs left by the mosquitoes last year can stay dormant for up to five years.
