Douglas English

“ It robbed the grub of sentient life, yet left it living. So Nature had enjoined. For every infant Spinipes, a score of live green grubs. Robbed of full life, lest struggling they should harm the egg; forbidden death, lest dying they should taint the shaft; lulled to long sleep in mercy. Of Nature's ordinance the grub knew nothing—and Spinipes knew nothing. Her task was to make store of food against the time when her gold egg should hatch. ”

“ How would you like to sleep straightaway through the winter, and miss Guy Fawkes, and Christmas, and New Year, and Valentine's Day, and skating, and snowballing, and round games in the evening, and having stories read to you by the fire, and all those delightful things which come to cheer us when the weather is damp and gloomy, making us feel somehow that summer is a queer, impossible kind of time, just as in summer we find it hard to imagine what it feels like to be really cold? ”

“ Bird notes, that in the burrow had been restful, now screamed and whistled in his ear. Out from the shelter-side of leaves, out from the heart of {106} flowers, out from the grass-stems and from earth itself, came whirring, humming, buzzing insects. In this new myriad-peopled world there seemed small room for loneliness. A red mouse bobbed up from his hole, stared at him curiously, then whisked about and vanished. Bright eyes bejewelled the grass-tufts. Here a flick-footed lizard, here a slow-trailing blindworm, here a squat toad. The day-moths woke and flitted leaf to leaf. ”

“ The common shrews live higher, scratch two-inch levels where the rootlets aid them, and trust to their quick ears. The Pygmy takes what stouter beasties leave; and that is how the Pygmy's tail was moved—his sleeping-hole, the mould of some long-fallen stone, abutted on the shaft.
That two shrews should be fighting was quite usual. Shrews fight to keep their limbs in trim; they fight in play; they fight in deadly earnest. A veteran shrew is scarred in every part of him; great scars like thumbmarks, where new growth of fur has failed to draw up level with the old. ”

“ The reason why a Bat is a cleverer, I don't mean a stronger, flier than a bird, is a reason which you young people will find to be a very common one, if ever you try your hand at guessing Mother Nature's riddles. It is simply this—that he has to be. A Bat has to catch his food, tiny food mostly, in the air, and he has to catch it in a bad light, and, as far as we can tell, though we cannot be sure of this, his eyesight is not as good as, {19} say, a swallow's eyesight. ”

“ Our last sheep is the Giant Wood Wasp, who is not a wasp at all, and is much more common in this country than he used to be. He is a handsome black and yellow insect with a body about an inch long, and his wolf's clothing is his black and yellow colour. This is the commonest wolf's clothing of all. You know I expect that a number of stinging insects, wasps and bees, have a black and yellow, or black and red colouring, and you know too, I dare say, that there are a great many flies who have no stings but are coloured in much the same way. ”

“ His eyes and nose had vanished. The right of either foot was now the left; the left of either hand was now the right; his head, subverted, curled to touch his toes, and, in his back, was a deep hollow.
This sounds involved, and that is just what Bombinator was.
"It's awful," said Bombinatrix.
"What do I look like?" spluttered Bombinator. "It's awkward talking to your feet."
"You're like—you're like a toadstool," said {42} Bombinatrix, "a crinkled, gummy, yellow-spotted toadstool."
"That's the idea," said Bombinator, as he snapped back to shapeliness. "Now you try," and Bombinatrix tried. ”

“ Up rose the kingly foxgloves, tier upon tier of them pink-purple, but Bunny Rabbit missed these too.
A golden world—the ragwort blazing on the slope, below the mellowing corn-field, and, mantling primrose hills, the dawn.
{102} Now Bunny Rabbit was ready.
The burrow winds in four sharp turns, and, at each one, he stubbed his nose. This through a mad desire to keep near Mother; for Mother's tail bobbed in quick jerks, shaving each corner to a hair, and he and all his brothers raced to catch it. ”

“ No other English butterfly has the same pretty curves to its wings, and some of you, I dare say, will know what it is by its shape. But I must tell those who do not know. It is a Brimstone Butterfly, and its colour is bright, bright yellow with an orange spot in the middle of each wing (you can only see one wing in the picture, the other three are hidden behind it; one way to tell a butterfly from a moth is to remember that butterflies' wings close standing up, but nearly all moths' wings close down flat) . ”

“ Now the colour of people depends a little on the colour of their blood, for there is a network of tiny veins in the lower part of their skin, but it depends even more on millions of little specks of yellowish and brownish paint which lie in the upper part of their skin. A negro may be as black as your hat outside, but his blood is red all the same, and he looks black because the little specks of paint in the upper part of his skin are very dark and hide the red blood behind them. ”

“ To begin with, you must remember that an animal has not got the beautiful little nest-making tool which a bird has—I mean, of course, a beak. A bird's beak is used something like a knitting-needle, to thread the little wisps of hay and feathers and moss and things like that in and out and round about, until they stick where the beak tells them. ”

“ This is how the Pygmy coils Himself up to sleep
Then he has to make up for the hungry time when bad weather has kept him in his hole.
In the autumn one often finds dead shrewmice lying on the paths. Nobody quite knows why they die in the autumn, but I think it is because only a few of them, if any, are strong enough to stand cold and wet and hunger all at once. The rest die just like the leaves die. ”

“ Now some wise folk think {27} that the ornament on the face of a leaf-nosed Bat, which makes him appear so very ugly to our ideas (though I have no doubt his wife thinks it very beautiful) may give him a kind of sixth sense which is neither seeing, nor smelling, nor hearing, nor feeling, nor tasting: a sense, that is, like that which blind people often seem to possess and which helps them, poor souls, through their world of darkness. ”

“ If you hold a piece one way it seems a dull grey all over, but if you hold it another you see all the colours of the rainbow, and you can even make the colours move about it if you handle it properly. Now if the colours were paint they would not move about, though they might not be so bright in some positions as in others, and for the present you {267} must be satisfied to know that a Chamæleon skin, besides holding clusters of paint-specks which change their shape, is so wonderfully made that it can show mother-of-pearl colours as well. ”

“ If you want to see a fish's gills you must lift up the hard flap of skin which covers them. The tadpole soon grows a flap of skin, though, just like a fish, and this always appears first on the right side, so that at one stage he looks as if he had only one gill, the one on the left side. When both the flaps of skin have grown, the tadpole is really a little fish, and he stays in much the same shape, though he gets fatter and fatter, for about a month. ”

“ The first thing that animals do, then, is to collect a little store of nest material. The next thing is to dive right into the middle of it. When they are well in the middle, they begin turning over and over, with a tug here and a push there, and little curls and flicks of the tail (the Harvest Mouse has the most useful tail of any of our animals, and that, I think, is one reason why his nest is so neat) , until in a very short time they have scooped out a hollow in the ball of grass, or whatever it may be, and {87} are sitting inside it. ”

“ The Spider, as you might guess, is one of {214} the Wolves, and so is the Dragon in the Water-weed, who turns into one of our largest dragon flies, if he is lucky; while the caterpillars and the Giant Wood Wasp are just silly harmless sheep.
Have you ever thought of the wonderful struggles which are always going on in the insect world—the struggles to eat, and the struggles not to be eaten? Nearly all insects seem to be the food for something or other. Most animals enjoy them thoroughly, so do many birds, and many reptiles and amphibians (frogs and toads) and many fish. ”

“ The hunters of the caterpillars are the ichneumon flies. Ichneumon flies do not eat caterpillars but lay their eggs inside them. They have a special instrument for the purpose, and when the grubs hatch out they gradually eat away the fleshy parts of the caterpillar so that it seldom has strength {222} enough to turn into a chrysalis, let alone a butterfly, or moth, or beetle, as the case may be. ”

“ I don't mean when they are so small that it seems a kindness to call them tadpoles at all, but when they are quite a good size, with great fat heads and shiny little eyes and squiggly little tails. And how many of you can tell me the number of different kinds of tadpoles which one can find in England in the springtime? Most of you, I am sure, know a tadpole when you see one (sometimes he is called "pot-ladle,"or "polly-wog," {30} or "horse-nail,") and some of you may know that a fat frog-tadpole is brown with little specks of gold, while a fat toad-tadpole is black all over ”

“ A Rat's track is much the same, only larger; and a Stoat's track is the same as a Weasel's, only larger. A Hedgehog does not often come out in the snow, but he does sometimes and leaves a very smudgy track behind him, for he drags his fur along the ground.
Where The Weasel met the Rook
You can see where the Rook's wing hit the snow
Two Mouse Trails leading to holes in the snow
Snow shows one much more than mud, but, unless it is of just the right softness the prints in it are apt to be splodgy, and I don't think you ever get so perfect a track in snow as you sometimes do in mud. ”

“ He has, as you see, an extraordinary shape for a caterpillar, I don't think that any other caterpillar in this country has the same long skinny legs—and he is able to strike extraordinary attitudes which make him look very spidery indeed, particularly from in front, for then the two little spikes at the end of his lobster body appear over the top of his head and look like a spider's pincers. ”

“ This to Bartimæus.
"Cats!" said the Pygmy Shrew. Vainly did Bartimæus strive to see her—a sorrel leaf concealed her, head to tail.
"Worse than dogs. Worse than weasels. Worse than cats," said the Harvest Mouse. "TRAPS!"
"We Harvest Mice are never trapped, and stump-tail mice are only trapped by chance—or their own folly. ”

“ One will use nothing but little spiders, another nothing but little flies, another, like Spinipes, nothing but little beetle grubs. And the queer part is that they seldom seem to make any mistake as to the kind of food they want. It will be one kind of spider, and one kind of fly, and one kind of beetle-grub. ”

“ Frogs and toads usually lay their eggs in places where the sun does shine on them and warms them gently, and so hatches them out, but of course they do not lay them in glass bottles, and if the sun shines on these, the water will get warmer than is good for them, partly because there is no other water round to keep it cool, and partly because the bottle acts as a kind of burning-glass, and brings too much of the sunshine into itself, and so gives too much warmth to the eggs.
{33} Some people think the jelly of frog's or toad's spawn acts like a burning-glass too ”

“ To do all these things well he has had to be built in a very special way, and I will try to explain to you how he has been built by comparing a Bat with one of ourselves, for you must remember that a Bat belongs to the same great order of living creatures as we do, and that a Bat is much more like a human being than a bird is. ”

“ Hard work in store for Spinipes! Three hours she spent in raising a fresh tower, five hours in reprovisioning her burrow. But she no longer worked alone. For others of her race had found the cliff, and other towers, twin to her own, were rising from the sand-ledge. Between them pygmy digger {166} wasps dug shafts to match their bodies, and trident-tailed ichneumons sailed about them, and sneaking, prying, jewel flies, here, there, and everywhere on mischief bent. ”

“ But Mother Nature never does forget, and never spoils her babies. She whispers "bedtime," and they go.
The little insects go first—the flies, and beetles, and earwigs, and frog-hoppers, and myriads of other tiny creatures which you can see in the grass on any warm day by just lying down and opening your eyes.
Toadums
For all Mother Nature's care I fear that most of these die, but some may manage to live through the cold, and among the larger kinds of insects some always do. ”

“ Generally each hole has between twenty and thirty little caterpillars in it, and sometimes, when caterpillars are scarce, the Mother Wasp has to work hard for three or four days. If {132} you dig into a hole yourself and look at the store of little caterpillars, you will see there is something the matter with them. They seem to be alive and yet they don't seem to be able to crawl. Wise men say that the wasp stings them just enough to make them drowsy so that they can't crawl out of the hole, and can't hurt the wasp grub by jostling up against it. ”

“ When people change colour it is because for one cause or another the colour of their blood can be more plainly, or less plainly, seen; and, when this cause is taken away, their old colour returns, for the little specks of paint have not altered in themselves at all. ”

“ Some animals, however, make nests which are not in burrows, and though these are not nearly so easy to find as birds' nests, they can be found if you know the sort of place to look for them in.
{77} There are four animals in this country whose nests can be found without having to dig, and these are the mole, the squirrel, the dormouse, and the harvest-mouse. Three of these build their nests above the ground, and the fourth, "the little gentleman in black velvet," builds the ground above his nest. ”

“ Some people think that these frighten off creatures who might eat him, just like those on the Elephant Hawk caterpillar, and some people think just the opposite—that the eye-markings are so clear a mark that the butterfly's enemies will bite at them, and so get a mouthful of butterfly's wing, instead of the butterfly himself ”

“ We must not forget gold and silver. When I was young, I expected to find gold and silver in a really nice paint-box, and I do not suppose {124} young people have changed much since then. Silver we should have no trouble about. There is a big family of butterflies called the Fritillaries, who have wonderful patches and ribbons of silver on their wings. I do not think you will find gold, except perhaps a little gold powder, on any English butterfly, but you will find it on several chrysalises. ”

“ The Brimstone comes out first of all, often quite early in February, and so he is the first butterfly that is likely to be noticed in the year.
Perhaps his coming out at a time when cows began to give more milk, and butter began to be more plentiful, had something to do with his being called "butterfly," but I think that his colour had more to do with it.
The Swallow-Tail Butterfly
Almost a paint-box in itself. It will give you blue, red, black and yellow. It is only found in the Cambridgeshire Fens
What lovely colours butterflies are! ”

“ The difficulties of photographing from wild life active creatures of such small dimensions as hymenopterous insects are very great from an optical standpoint. The picture of Spinipes bringing the beetle grub to her tube took several years to accomplish successfully, and the strain involved by the conditions, a blazing June sun on the operator's back, an uncertain foothold, and the necessity of keeping the attention riveted for hours on one particular patch of sunlit sand, was exceptional. ”