Thomas Alfred Coward

“ Then one day the air is filled with winged aphides, another and different generation has appeared, and we know that the end approaches. A frost, a heavy shower or two, and all our plants are clean; gone is the blight, gone the ladybird, syrphid, and lace-wing larvæ, which fought so bravely for us during the period of abundance. The race is wiped out, suddenly and efiectually, but hidden from our eyes is that spark of life in a few dormant individuals which will in spring kindle the prolific flame once more; we have not done with aphides because none is visible. ”

“ Suppose that for a few seasons the cod should have a dearth of enemies, say if some epidemic or other catastrophe overtook the normal feeders on its pelagic eggs and larvae, and a few thousands from each we came to maturity; where would the food be in the overstocked seas for the vast army of hungry cods? Nature, by the simple method of starving the unwanted, would adjust its dislocated balance. And what would happen, any time might happen, to the guillemot if the carrion crow, jackdaw or other egg-snatching species should for a few years increase abnormally? ”

“ Just enough survive to carry on the race, to repeople the world with winged annoyance. And the aphides, the green fly, which clustered in uncountable crowds on our plants, sucking the life-blood of our cherished roses, our necessary vegetables, our forest trees; the stem mother produced millions of parthenogenetic offspring, generation after generation during the summer. Alarming calculations were issued to warn us what would happen if the garden were neglected; we syringe, we employ all kinds of restraints and preventive methods, but the aphides continue to multiply. ”

“ The mouse, which froze when the owl reeled past, attends to its ablutions immediately the coast is clear. All these avoid the danger, but are not unnerved; they do not think beforehand about what may happen; they brood not on the terrors of the past. If we watch the play of animals, listen to the singing of birds, observe the busy hunt for material satisfaction of the insects, we see no suggestion of fear or misery ”

“ Nature did not sweep off the superfluous young; for once in a way they were not superfluous. Kestrels passed the message on, rocks swarmed to the field of action and became bloodthirsty mouse eaters. For generations game-preserving man had been fighting against these vermin, and vermin came in hordes, returning good for evil, to feed on vermin. The voles declined, the voles vanished, the tainted fields recovered and clothed themselves with grass, and the enemies of voles, replete, either went back to their own place or in their turn perished. ”

“ Tragedy and death are all around, but they mean nothing to the creature which has no fear of extinction, but is simply conscious that it exists and that its existence consists in satisfying its immediate needs. ”

“ Well known is the American pond weed, choking canals, rivers, and lakes; steady and deadly its increase, sudden its death when it has devoured all the nourishment in the mud and water. Watercress, an introduced plant in New Zealand, has blocked rivers so as to cause floods, and willows have been planted so that their spreading roots may rob the cress of nourishment. By no means can man always call in the correct natural antagonist to stem the torrent of increase which unwise introduction of an alien species often causes. ”

“ The heedless butterfly, flitting from flower to flower, bent on pure animal satisfaction, for it does not need the sweets it sips, dodges the onslaught of the shrike, and at once continues its hunt for pleasure. ”

“ In order that there may be neither increase nor decrease, when we take an average of many generations, it is absolutely necessary that each pair of animals shall produce during their whole lifetime no more nor no less than a couple of offspring to perpetuate the species ”

“ Some animals have more enemies than others, some pass through stages which expose them to more varied dangers; indeed, the more complex the life before reaching maturity the less the chance of attaining it. But there is compensation, or none of the weaker brethren could survive; the creature with a simple, shadowed life produces few young, and the required number, a fair proportion of the whole, come to their own; the one with many foes and a long and precarious youth presents the world with an overflowing family. ”

“ The Balance of Nature—have not the masters of science pointed out what it means again and again? Yet, how readily we forget or ignore their teaching, for the relative abundance of interdependent animals and plants must be, in the long run, a stable quantity. ”

“ The guillemot, on the other hand, a bird which no doubt assists in keeping down the surplus population of the cod, has but to lose a few, perhaps two or three, out of its annual output of one big egg. The mortality of the species is small, yet when we find the storm-battered bodies of this pelagic species thick along the tide line we think more seriously of it than the massacre of the millions of possible cods. ”

“ Nailed on the barn are the fostering, wind-dried, grinning trophies of the keeper's prowess—hawks, owls, jays, magpies, slender stoats and weasels, grey-pated daws and a rook or two, a squirrel, and the tails of sundry domestic cats. ”

“ The cod with its two to five million eggs might mourn the death of five million infants and leave its fortune to two and only two; the rest, if it is any satisfaction to it to know, have probably gone to improve the stock of other species, not excluding the cod itself; indeed, it is not at all unlikely that many cod thrive on their own offspring. ”

“ Here and there on wall or window-pane we found one stiff and dead, in attitude of life, but glued to its sarcophagus by the deadly fungus that ate its life away: but we only see a few, millions perish unnoticed. ”

“ But fear, as we understand it, is absent; the weaker creature watches for danger, but has no apprehension; the alertness is not merely instinctive but largely reflex. The quickest to act without waste of time for thought is the one which survives and leaves progeny; the weakling goes to the wall. ”

“ And so long as there is life and health there is every indication that those possessing it find enjoyment and pleasure in the possession. Each animal to exist at all must be alert and fit, ever watchful to avoid danger, ever quick and strong to overcome an adversary or obtain a victim. ”

“ Fluctuations do occur, sometimes through climatic variation, often directly due to human stupidity, or from reasons which we cannot fathom. Suddenly we awake to the fact that the field vole is swarming in some hilly area, that the concourse of starlings is beyond all calculation, that the gamma moth is on every plant, that an army of caterpillars of the antler moth are eating all before them. ”

“ What is so easy to see where vertebrates are the chief actors is not so evident amongst the lower forms of life, but the great changes, the struggles for the mastery, are just as keen, just as ruthless in result. ”

“ Simply this, that the joy and success of one species spells sorrow and failure for others. The supply of victuals, whether animal or vegetable, of each species is not inimitable, and when your successful species gets to grips with others the weaker kinds suffer famine. ”

“ A pair of birds may lay an average of four eggs per year for three years; ten out of twelve produced must have negative results; the young if hatched and reared must never become parents, or if more than the two survive in many of the same species we shall at once have a noticeable increase. A small steady increase in the families descended from one pair of birds will, in a few years' time, mean a vast army ”

“ Again the Board of Agriculture gave advice, and some effort was made to reduce the plague, but it was the rocks and daws, the partridges and, most of all, the ichneumon flies, which really tackled the problem; the grass came up again, doubtless fertilised by the parasitised corpses of its late enemies; once more Nature was responsible for righting the wrong. ”

“ Few wild creatures perish in decline, die of old age; sudden, often violent death terminates their short lives; ordinary disease is rare, though parasitical disease, in which some other organism benefits, is commoner. ”

“ Indeed, the wholesale destruction is numerically much greater than amongst vertebrates, and not merely because the smaller try are more abundant. Year by year, if we observe and think, we witness a calamity, a massacre more ruthless than anything in vertebrate economy. ”

“ That these particular species mentioned have any interdependence is mere theory, and the whole skein is so ravelled that we cannot disentangle its intricate meshes; but there is connection between all increases and decreases. By no means is it certain that the improved breech-loader explains the absence of the great bustard from our open plains, or that the egg~collector wiped out Savi's warbler and threatens the Kentish plover and Dartford warbler; men, in their greed, help to destroy the struggling species, and there is no excuse for this rapacity ”

“ THE KEEPER'S GIBBET.
fullness of life. Indeed, that is what the healthy animal does, enjoys all that life means to it; care, anxiety, apprehension, fear, as we understand them, have no place in its economy. ”

“ Naturally the number varies with regard to individuals; some leave more survivors, some none, and from year to year increase or decrease in the species may be noticed. But when the average results are considered the final doom is always the same—all but two of the hopefuls must go to the wall. ”