Jean-Henri Fabre

“ I have even seen the Grasshopper—the height of audacity, this—dart in pursuit of a Cicada in mad flight. Even so does the Sparrow-hawk pursue the Swallow in the sky. But the bird of prey here is inferior to the insect. It attacks a weaker than itself. The Grasshopper, on the other hand, assaults a colossus, much larger than herself and stronger; and nevertheless the result of the unequal fight is not in doubt. The Grasshopper rarely fails with the sharp pliers of her powerful jaws to disembowel her capture, which, being unprovided with weapons, confines itself to crying out and kicking. ”

“ Well, here, by a strange inversion that confuses all our views on life, a Cyclopean task is laid upon the nymph of the Anthrax. It is the nymph that has to toil, to strive, to exhaust itself in efforts to burst the wall and open the way out. To the embryo falls the desperate duty, which shows no mercy to the nascent flesh; to the adult insect the joy of resting in the sun. This transposition of functions has as its result a well sinker's equipment in the nymph, an eccentric, complicated equipment which nothing suggested in the larva and which nothing recalls in the perfect insect. ”

“ And, strange to say, these insects vying in maternal solicitude with the flower-despoiling tribe of Bees are none other than the Dung-beetles, the dealers in ordure, the scavengers of the cattle-fouled meadows. We must pass from the scented blossoms of our flower-beds to the Mule-dung of our high-roads to find a second instance of devoted mothers and lofty instincts. Nature abounds in these antitheses. What are our ugliness or beauty, our cleanliness or dirt to her? Out of filth, she creates the flower; from a little manure, she extracts the thrice-blessed grain of wheat. ”

“ No exploration of the gallery—no anxiety for the distressed larva; though the grub, whose delicate skin has just exchanged the gentle moisture of a cave for burning sunshine, is writhing on its heap of chewed Diptera, the mother takes no notice of it. For her it is no more than any one of the objects strewn on the sand,—a little pebble, a clod, a scrap of dried mud,—nothing more. It is undeserving of attention. This tender, faithful mother, who wears herself out in efforts to reach her nursling’s cradle, cares nothing just now but for her entrance door—the door she is used to. ”

“ From time to time the insect places its mandibles and forehead on the ground, then rears high upon its hind-legs as though to turn head over heels. In all this I see a manifestation of delight. We rub our hands when rejoicing at a success; the Ammophila is celebrating her triumph over the monster in her own fashion. During this fit of delirious joy, what is the wounded caterpillar doing? It can no longer walk; but all the part behind the thorax struggles violently, curling and uncurling when the Ammophila sets a foot upon it. The mandibles open and shut menacingly. ”

“ In returning to the dovecote and the burrow, when man has artificially made them lose their bearings and carried them to great distances, in unfamiliar directions and into regions which they have not yet visited, are the Pigeon and the Cerceris guided by recollection? Is memory their compass when, on reaching a certain height, whence they can, so to speak, pick up the scent after a fashion, they dart with all their power of wing towards the horizon where their nests are? Is it memory that traces their road through the air, across regions which they are seeing for the first time? ”

“ In the calm of the twilight the little truffle-hunter goes abroad, chirping softly to encourage itself. It explores the soil, and interrogates it as to its contents, exactly as does the truffle-gatherer's dog. The sense of smell warns it that the desired object is beneath it, covered by a few inches of sand. Certain of the precise point where the treasure lies, it sinks a well vertically downwards, and infallibly reaches it. So long as there is food left it does not again leave the burrow. It feasts happily at the bottom of its well, heedless of the open or imperfectly closed burrow. ”

“ Daily, if the sky be clear, the Lycosa, carrying her young, comes up from the burrow, leans on the kerb and spends long hours basking in the sun. Here, on their mother's back, the youngsters stretch their limbs delightedly, saturate themselves with heat, take in reserves of motor power, absorb energy.
They are motionless; but, if I only blow upon them, they stampede as nimbly as though a hurricane were passing. Hurriedly, they disperse; hurriedly, they reassemble: a proof that, without material nourishment, the little animal machine is always at full pressure, ready to work. ”

“ The Fly on the ceiling, it is true, adopts the same position; but she has her moments of rest. She flies, she walks in the usual way, she spreads herself flat in the sun. The Empusa, on the other hand, remains in her curious attitude for ten months on end, without a pause. Hanging from the wire netting, back downwards, she hunts, eats, digests, dozes, gets through all the experiences of an insect’s life, and finally dies. She clambers up while she is still quite young; she falls down in her old age, a corpse. ”

“ The night is a fine one for hunting; the air is calm, the moon shining. The hunt begins with a lugubrious war-cry. At that dreaded signal the tomtit hardly feels safe even in the deepest hollow of its tree, the redbreast trembles beneath its shelter of thick foliage, and the finch loses its head with fright. God of the weak, God of the little birds, protect them now! Make the owl, enraged as it still is from the insults of the day, miss them in its search! ”

“ In this voluptuous bed of stamens and petals he is encrusted, motionless; he remains there night and day, intoxicated by the heady fragrance, drunk with nectar. It needs the stimulus of fierce sunlight to arouse him from his bliss and set him soaring with a buzzing flight.
To watch the idle Beetle in his sybaritic bed, without further information, one would hardly suspect him of gluttony. What nourishment can he find on a rose or a cluster of hawthorn-blossom? At most a tiny drop of sugary exudation, for he does not browse upon the petals, still less upon the foliage. ”

“ On a rosebush apparently most peaceful there is death every minute. But the small, the humble, and weak, are the habitual pasture, the daily bread, of the large eaters. To how many dangers is not the plant-louse exposed, so tiny, so weak, and without any means of defense! No sooner does a little bird, hardly out of the shell, discover with its piercing eyes a spot haunted by the plant-lice, than, merely as an appetizer, it will swallow hundreds. And if a worm, far more rapacious, a horrible worm expressly created and put into the world to eat you alive, joins in, ah! ”

“ Action calls for strongly flavoured spices, won by fighting. The animal acts; therefore it kills. The highest phase, perhaps, of a self-conscious intelligence, man, deserving nothing better, shares with the brute the tyranny of the belly as the irresistible motive of action.
But I have wandered too far afield. A living speck, swarming in the paunch of a grub, tells us of the brigandage of life. How well it understands its trade as an exterminator! In vain does the Crioceris-larva take refuge in an unassailable casket: its executioner makes herself so small that she is able to reach it. ”

“ A solid fastening is superfluous for the summer tent, which lasts but a day; it is indispensable to the permanent shelter which will have to bear the burden of heavy snows and the buffeting of icy winds. Fully alive to these perils, the spinner of the pine-tree considers himself bound, however importunate his hunger, not to saw through the rafters of his house.
Inside the nest, therefore, opened by my scissors I see a thick arcade of green leaves, more or less closely wrapped in a silky sheath whence dangle shreds of cast skin and strings of dried droppings. ”

“ You complain of rats, but you nail the owl to your door and let its body dry in the sun as a hideous trophy; you cry out against cut-worms, but you crush the mole every time your spade turns one up; you disembowel the hedge-hog and set your dogs on him just for fun; you bewail the ravages of moth and worm in your granaries, but if the bat falls into your clutches it is seldom that you show him any mercy. Your complaints go up to heaven, but all these willing helpers of yours you treat as creatures accursed. Blind fools that you are, filled with an insane desire to kill! ”

“ At this moment of the return to the nest, I see nothing particular in the play of the antennæ. Without once letting go her prey, the Bembex scratches a little in front of her, at the very spot where she has alighted, gives a push with her head and straightway enters, with the Fly under her abdomen. The sand falls in, the door closes and the Wasp is at home.
It makes no difference that I have seen the Bembex return to her nest hundreds of times; it is always with fresh astonishment that I behold the keen-sighted insect find without hesitation a door whose presence there is nothing to indicate. ”

“ She knows that her grub will regale itself on what she herself abhors; and overcoming her repugnance, not even giving it a thought, she takes the plunge. Is she actuated by the memory of her larval days? But what memory of food can she have after a year’s interval, above all after an absolute remoulding of her organism? To draw the Cetonia hither, to make her come from the rose to this putrid heap, there is something better than the memory of the belly; there is a blind, irresistible impulse, which acts in the most logical manner under cover of a seeming insanity. ”

“ April comes to an end, and the song of the Cricket commences. At first we hear only timid and occasional solos; but very soon there is a general symphony, when every scrap of turf has its performer. I am inclined to place the Cricket at the head of the choristers of spring. In the waste lands of Provence, when the thyme and the lavender are in flower, the Cricket mingles his note with that of the crested lark, which ascends like a lyrical firework, its throat swelling with music, to its invisible station in the clouds, whence it pours its liquid arias upon the plain below. ”

“ And in this nest are six eggs, laid prettily side by side; and those eggs are a magnificent blue, as though steeped in a dye of celestial azure. Overpowered with happiness, I lie down on the grass and stare.
Meanwhile, the mother, with a little clap of her gullet—'Tack! Tack!'—flies anxiously from stone to stone, not far from the intruder. My age knows no pity, is still too barbarous to understand maternal anguish. A plan is running in my head, a plan worthy of a little beast of prey. I will come back in a fortnight and collect the nestlings before they can fly away. ”

“ For three weeks on end, I see repeated in all its details the spectacle to which I have been accustomed in the victims extracted from the burrows or taken from the huntress: the wide-open mandibles, the quivering palpi and tarsi, the ovipositor shuddering convulsively, the abdomen throbbing at long intervals, the spark of life rekindled at the touch of a pencil. In the fourth week, these signs of life, which have gradually weakened, disappear, but the insect still remains irreproachably fresh. At last a month passes; and the paralysed creature begins to turn brown. It is over; death has come. ”

“ With a few threads and some small leaves joined together, the Crab Spider builds, above her lofty nest, a rudimentary watch-tower where she stays permanently, greatly emaciated, flattened into a sort of wrinkled shell through the emptying of her ovaries and the total absence of food. And this mere shred, hardly more than a skin that persists in living without eating, stoutly defends her egg-sack, shows fight at the approach of any tramp. She does not make up her mind to die until the little ones are gone. ”

“ The Calicurgus who has just put the Spider on her back after a brisk fight knows quite well that her prostrate foe is not dead. The latter, thinking to protect itself, simulates the inertia of a corpse; the assailant profits by this to deliver her most perilous blow, the stab in the mouth. Were the fangs, each tipped with its drop of poison, to open then; were they to snap, to give a desperate bite, the Pompilus would not dare to expose the tip of her abdomen to their deadly scratch. The shamming of death is exactly what enables the huntress to succeed in her dangerous operation. ”

“ The nest is certainly there—underground, at the depth of a few inches: in a little cell, dug in cool firm sand, is an egg, perhaps a larva, which the mother feeds daily with flies, the invariable food of Bembex larvæ. She must be able at any moment to penetrate to this nest, carrying on the wing, between her feet, the nursling’s daily ration, just as a bird of prey arrives at its eyrie carrying game for its brood in its claw. ”

“ The vanquished Cricket makes off as fast as he can; the victor insults him with a boastful ditty; then, moderating his tone, he veers and tacks around the object of his desires.
He makes himself look smart and, at the same time, submissive. Gripping one of his antennæ with a claw, he takes it in his mandibles to curl it and grease it with saliva. With his long spurred and red-striped hind-legs, he stamps the ground impatiently and kicks out at nothing. His emotion renders him dumb. His wing-cases, it is true, quiver rapidly, but they give forth no sound, or at most an agitated rustling. ”

“ How many lives does the Swallow, to mention only the most peaceable, harvest in the course of a single day! From morning to evening he gulps down Crane-flies, Gnats and Midges joyously dancing in the sunbeams. Quick as lightning he passes; and the dancers are decimated. They perish; then their melancholy remnants fall from the nest containing the young brood, in the form of guano which becomes the turf's inheritance. And so it is with all and everything, with large and small, from end to end of the animal progression. A perpetual massacre perpetuates the flux of life. ”

“ So rough an upbringing has always seemed to me improbable. How could a Beetle’s egg, that delicate thing, so sensitive under its soft wrapper, survive the shaking-up which it would undergo in that rolling cradle? In the germ is a spark of life which the least touch, the veriest trifle can extinguish. Are we to believe that the parents would deliberately bump it over hill and dale for hours? No, that is not the way in which things happen; a mother does not subject her offspring to the torture of a Regulus’ barrel. ”

“ The shrew-mouse has the same tastes as the mole: it is an ardent hunter of small game, a devourer of larvæ and insects, as you can see by its finely serrate teeth. Its slender body, made for squeezing into the smallest hole, and its long snout, shaped for prying into the narrowest crannies and crevices, enable it to go wherever vermin may be lurking. Woe to the wood-louse rolled up like a tiny pellet in some crack in the wall, and to the slug hiding under a stone! The shrew-mouse will have no difficulty in catching them, being so small that it could make its home in a nutshell. ”

“ Lured abroad by the mild temperature of the twilight hours, a swarm of insects leave their retreats and come out to play in the open air, to hunt for food, and to mate, one with another. It is then that great night-moths fly abruptly from flower to flower and plunge their long proboscis to the bottom of the corolla, where they suck up the honey; it is then that the mosquito, eager for human blood, sings its war-song in our ears and chooses our tenderest spot for the insertion of its envenomed lancet ”

“ Above our heads the sky, perfectly clear, presents no unusual appearance; the sun shines there in all its brilliancy. Down there at our feet, almost in the plains, white clouds spread themselves out. The wind sweeps them before it and drives them toward the summit. There they are, rolling and mounting up the side of the mountain. One would think they were immense flocks of cotton pushed up the slope by some invisible hand. Now and then a ray of sunlight penetrates their depths and gives them the brilliancy of gold and fire. ”

“ It is not at a time when the bleak mistral howls for a fortnight without intermission and freezes the ground hard, it is not at a time when snowstorms follow close upon that icy blast, that the delicate transformations of the nymphosis are able to take place or the insect to dream of abandoning the shelter of its cocoon. It needs the warm moisture of the earth under the summer sun before it can leave its cell. ”