J-NRLF C 2 773 THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESENTED BY PROF. CHARLES A. KOEOID AND MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID {British Butterflies and other Insects {British {Butterflies and other Insects Edited by Edward Thomas Illustrated H odder and Stoughton Publishers London Printed in 1908 Butler and Tanner Tht Stfrvood Printi*? Works Promt and London CONTENTS PAGE I SOME ENGLISH BUTTERFLIES By ANTHONY COLLETT. II THE BEE MIND 21 By G. A. B. DEWAR. Ill GHOST MOTH EVENINGS 27 By G. A. B. DEWAR. IV THE RAILWAY EMBANKMENT . . . • 35 By G. A. B. DEWAR. V CONTENTS PAGE V BUTTERFLIES IN BED 43 By G. A. B. DEWAR. VI PEARL SKIPPERS 49 By G. A. B. DEWAR. VII ANAX IMPERATOR 55 By G. A. B. DEWAR. VIII THE SPHINX MOTH .... . 61 By G. A. B. DEWAR. IX FIELD NOTES ON SOME ENGLISH BUTTERFLIES . 67 By RICHARD SOUTH. vi CONTENTS PAGE X DAY-FLYING MOTHS 79 By RICHARD SOUTH. XI THE ENTOMOLOGIST'S METHODS .... 91 By RICHARD SOUTH. XII HUMOURS OF INSECT LIFE IN OCTOBER . . 101 By ALFRED W. RMS. XIII THE MAKERS OF GOSSAMER . . . .117 By F. P. SMITH. vn SOME ENGLISH BUTTERFLIES SOME ENGLISH BUTTERFLIES " Unpiloted in the sun . . . With idle effort plundering one by one The nectaries of deepest-throated blooms." — ROBERT BRIDGES. MOTHS and butterflies alike are embraced in one great order of insects, and the scientific distinction between them is often uncertain and obscure. But the butter- flies have, above all, a delight of pure and ardent living in the sunshine which is the real distinction of their race, though the needs of science may have enforced recourse to an exacter standard of discrimina- tion based upon the form and fashion of their feeler- tips. There are a few moths, it is true, which love the sunshine better than the night ; but no single butterfly has willing traffic with the hours of darkness, unless, exceptionally and rarely, for some syrup- loving and bibulous Red Admiral, which may be found still clinging drowsily in its cups to a rotting pear or plum in the warm September garden, under the canopy of a moonless sky. Even more than the 3 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES beauty of their colouring, which is by no means always greater than that of the moths, or than the absence from among their number of that dim and multitudin- ous fringe of mote-like life which confuses the moth- world with the shadow of specific infinity, it is this brilliant vitality, this natural citizenship of the sun, which marks out butterflies among insects with a supreme attraction and charm. When the first day comes in March when the air is quick with awakening life, and the earth drinks deep of new, hot, golden splendour from a sun now high in heaven, the seal is set on returning spring by the great yellow wings of the Brimstone butterfly, purposefully beating down the rides and lanes like a visible concentration of the light. With him, or even before him, in the illusory brightness of some halcyon winter noon, there appear three or four other species of a different family, of which the character- istic predominant colour is deep and brilliant red. The commonest of these early spring butterflies are the Small Tortoiseshell, the Peacock with his rich eye-pattern, and the Brimstones, male and female, in their brilliant yellow and delicate primrose-green. Scarcer but still regular pioneers of spring are the Large Tortoiseshell, which has a tawnier dash in its red, and the strangely fretted Comma, with its out- line like a jagged shell. These, with three or four 4 SOME ENGLISH BUTTERFLIES others seen more rarely, make up the large and brilliant vanguard of the returning butterfly year ; and yet none of this band are true children of the reviving spring, but all are age-worn survivors of last Septem- ber's sun, which, by a special dispensation of Nature, have slept out the winter's dark and cold. If they are closely scanned, basking on the warm gravel walk as is the habit of the red " Vanessae," the eye will mark at once how sadly they are scarred and worn with accident and age. The strong, compact wings of the Brimstones seem usually in better case, but even the Brimstones appear tarnished and faded under the first suns of spring. The battered brightness of these hibernating butterflies in the new spring sunshine is in striking harmony with the withered and sluggish torpor which the earth still shows under the first full flood of revivifying light. The earth, too, is defaced and sore with winter, cumbered with bleached and matted her- bage where the new shoots are only now swiftly spring- ing, and bared to the brilliant sun with still arid and frost-scarred clods. Such days have all the poignancy of a siege relieved ; and the touch of pathos in this contrast is nowhere expressed more fully than when a torn red Tortoiseshell butterfly, that winter has scarcely spared, alights in the new March sunshine on a golden, fresh-blown dandelion flower, brilliant in every petal with the tender luxuriance of spring. 5 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES Spring waxes and deepens, the young leaves spread and glisten where all was bare, and presently there comes the day when the first new butterflies of the year wing their way abroad in the morning sunshine, with an unstained freshness of life and colour as beautiful as the larch's misty green, or the song of the chaffinches in the limes. The day of last year's veterans is done, as soon as their eggs have been laid on the young nettle or buckthorn shoots, to bring forth in due time, through threefold mutations of development, the full brood of late summer and early autumn. In harmony with the whole tone of the spring, the colours of the April butterflies are as delicate and fresh as those of the Vanessae and the Brimstones are deep and full. The Common White of the cabbage-gardens has a cool purity of colour, as it flutters down a moist upspringing hedge-bank of blue speedwells and starry stitchwort, which we forget to notice when high summer has multiplied its numbers. Much more beautiful still is the Orange-tip of the May lanes and meadows, dusted and chequered with gold and green on its under surface, and with half the white fore-wings of the male dipped in a brilliant orange-red. It lives out its life during the flower-time of the white cow-parsley, mimicking this blossom, which it loves to haunt, by the fretted whiteness of its wings ; and its pure tints brightly flushed with mounting summer 6 SOME ENGLISH BUTTERFLIES seem the very incarnation, in light winged form, of the essential spirit of May. Another of the first spring butterflies which wear all the tender freshness of the season is the Holly or Azure Blue, earliest of its tribe, and almost more beautiful than them all in its cerulean lustre, backed with a frosted silver more delicate than the seed-pearl pattern of the Common Blues of the June hayfields. White butterflies by the warm bank where the adders bask, sun-kindled Orange-tips on the white hemlock and pale mauve cuckoo-flower, and Holly Blues flickering headlong out of the sky that hides them across the dark sheen of their lustrous home boughs — all the voiceless beauty of the mounting spring is in those wings, and we lose, when they vanish, the last of the childhood of the year. The tints of the butterflies deepen as the year ad- vances, and from month to month, by meadow, wood- land and moor, the quivering pictures multiply that they inlay with their wings among the blossoms and verdure that each species loves. For each butterfly has its own flowers, its scenery, its weather ; the Wood Argus, if carried by rough winds into the open meadows, is as sad and hurried a fugitive as Noah's dove upon the unrestful waters, and there is no home among the glades and shadows for the Marbled Whites of the downside, or the Graylings of the heath and wold. This dependence upon particular localities, and on the 7 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES food-plants of the caterpillars which they support, has naturally had a great effect upon the increase and diminution of particular species. With the gradual drainage of the fen countries, the Large Copper has become wholly extinct, and the Swallowtail is now very rare and local ; on the other hand, the Large and Com- mon Whites undoubtedly owe their commonness at the present day to the universal cultivation of the cab-* bages and other garden plants on which the caterpillars feed. Before such green garden-stuff was universally grown in England, these Whites must have been among the scarcer English butterflies. Even to-day, on such a remote fringe of British civilization as some of the outer Hebrides, it is strange to see how the Common White is a scarce insect haunting the few island gardens, while the desolate peat-moors are covered with the rare Large Heath, a butterfly of the waste and morass which is scarcely seen in England, and only in certain narrow and desolate areas. The disappearance of the British Large Copper is all the more to be regretted •since it formed a distinct island species which had acquired, in ages of separate life, marked differences from the kindred butterfly of the Continent, which is still anything but rare. The British race of the Camber- well Beauty, the magnificent cousin of the Peacocks and Red Admirals, which also seems to have become •extinct within the memory of men of middle age, had 8 SOME ENGLISH BUTTERFLIES also a definite distinction of colour which separated it from the rich and stately insect still to be seen by every August visitor to the Alps or the Rhine. Even within the bounds of England itself, where there is no such rigorous separation of races as is imposed by the barrier of the sea or great mountain ranges, the tendency to such local differences is often seen at work. Those large and handsome moths, the Fox, the Oak Eggar and the Drinker (of which the two former are as sun- loving as the Brimstone itself) display a remarkable difference between the big, bright-coloured insects of the South, and the small, dark race of the North. As April swells into May, and May into June, the tribes of the butterflies increase, until about midsummer and hay-time the greatest number of species are on the wing at any one moment of the year. In these earlier days of summer the brightest pictures of butterfly life are to be seen in the broken woods and copses, and all such clean, luxuriant places where the sun shines freely down upon a mixed carpet of many-coloured flowers, and green bosses of irregular verdure mount- ing to the tree-tops in the light. As the woods and copses deepen to the full luxuriance of May, year by year the quiet, blossom-starred rides are filled with the chequered red-brown wings of the two smaller Pearl- bordered species of Fritillary, first of their splendid tribe. No less faithful to the wood-ride and to May 9 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES are the Large Skippers, spinning from leaf to flower on wings of a kindred golden brown, but of a hue not quite so rich and warm as the true Fritillary glow. With the reddish and the golden brown of those sun-loving, companionable wings, there comes up linked in memory the whole bright yearly mosaic of the copses of flowery May. Everywhere, in the herbage of the rides, still richer with promise than with fruition, there shines the veined turquoise blue of the self-heal or prunella, and the lighter yellow spikes of dragon-mouthed cow- wheat ; spotted orchises shine in the moister grassy places, and tall, stripling thistles begin to push skyward their tight purple knobs. On the blue and the purple blossoms quiver the rich brown wings of the Skippers and Fritillaries, and among them are always to be seen, in the true May copses of southern England, two slender-bodied Geometer moths, the cool, shining Silver-ground Carpet, which seems so common as to overflow into the daylight from its secret hiding-places, and that welcome and delicate harlequin, the Speckled Yellow, in his fancy dress of warm chocolate and orange. The Grizzly and Dingy Skippers are also abroad in May ; but they are hardly such thorough copse-butterflies as their largest brothers, friends of the early Fritillaries, and their darker colouring does not combine so vividly and characteristically with the bright spring flowers. 10 ILJ o £ 5 < UJ * £ •° £ SOME ENGLISH BUTTERFLIES The butterfly-pictures of the year grow no less dis- tinct and characteristic as the verdure deepens under midsummer skies, though they multiply greatly in number, and spread from their earlier sheltering coverts across the whole face of the land. In the June copses, when the carpet of cow-wheat and prunella has been submerged by the rising growth, the frosted silver of the bramble blossom shakes itself to birth over the un- curling fronds of bracken ; and when the cool, white bramble-blossom is born in the middle of year, then the lordlier Fritillary monarchs come forth to bask and feast upon it in the glades. There is no more beautiful picture in the midsummer woods than the deep, golden rides of oak and hazel and springing bracken, where the High Brown and Silver-washed Fritillaries seem the proud and conscious monarchs, sailing down the fair-way of the sunshine on broad wings of deepened sunlight glow, or fanning and poising in ecstasy on some large June flower, while the sheen of the silver mail of their under sides flashes for a moment and is withdrawn again from the light. Now, too, in wood- land and leafy places the midsummer sunshine brings forth the smaller but beautiful Hairstreak butterflies, of which even the commoner species are curiously fitful and capricious in their periodic appearances. The Green Hairstreak is perhaps the most generally distri- buted of all this tribe ; but it is the Purple Hairstreak ii BRITISH BUTTERFLIES that appears, in certain summers, in such large and brilliant companies as to become one of the most conspicuous of the butterflies of the wood. Often the high oak-crowns, or the lower sapling shoots, are alive in June with the shot purple of these busy little butter- flies, dancing and resting on the sprays and extremities of the boughs ; and sometimes the fancy takes them to descend in mass to the bramble-blossoms of some woodside hedge, where the orange-dotted grey of their under wings contrasts in singular beauty with the rich velvety bloom and flashing plaques of their upper sur- face. The bloom of the Purple Hairstreak is peculi- arly delicate and fugitive, even for the gloss of a butter- fly's wing ; the lightest touch destroys it, and its frailty is only equalled by the dark velvety green of the larger, glade-loving Ringlet, with its varying series of fine golden circles, which flaps abroad, in uncon- querable, somnolent hardihood, even under the wettest and most lowering skies. In the week when the days are longest, the hayfields and hedgesides suddenly become alive with the com- mon Large Meadow Brown, a butterfly which is even hardier than the Ringlet of the woods, and through long weeks of forbidding and flooded summers, is sometimes almost the only butterfly to be seen. It belongs to the same great general group as the Ringlets, a group which includes not only its own warmer- 12 SOME ENGLISH BUTTERFLIES coloured kinsman, the Small Meadow Brown, but also the rare Large Heath and the very common Small one of every waste and grass-patch, the Wood Argus, the warm, stone-basking Wall or Gatekeeper, the Grayling of the July wolds and moorlands, and numerous butter- flies more. Often by the very side of the Swiss glaciers, some sober, graceful little insect may be seen content- edly basking on the hungry boulders, and this will be one of the " Browns " ; and on our own Cumberland mountains, never at a height much less than 2,000 feet above the sea, there dwells one dusky, orange- flushed little creature, the Mountain Ringlet, which is our special English representative of the Alpine butterfly fauna, and a relic of the glacial age. There is a rare pleasure in seeing this valorous film of life emerging to battle with his peers and to rejoice in the keen, high mountain sunshine, when the cloud-world rolls away from the high Great Gable grass-slopes, or the shores of Sprinkling Tarn, under huge Bow Fell, and the eye ranges afar, over peak and cloven dale, to Man in the western sea. But even before the swarm of homely, flapping Meadow Browns suddenly appear with new June suits in the meadows, the hayfields and open commons have been mustering their tribes of butterfly life. When the large ox-eye daisies begin to fill the fields with pools and lakes of silver, the Common Blues appear 13 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES in their multitudes upon the blossoms of the standing grass, and are henceforward a constant feature of the summer. They are swiftly followed by many others of their beautiful tribe ; and all of them are creatures of the grass fields and the blossoms of the grass, unlike the earliest Holly Blues of April, which haunted the outer sides of sunny shrubberies and thickets. Another brood of the Holly Blues appears, indeed, in late July or August ; but with this exception, the Blues are characteristic butterflies of the fields and downs. Most noticeable among them are the large, pale-winged Chalk Hill Blues, whose filmy, clouded azure seems to reproduce the heat- dimmed lustre of the skies of their native July, just as the Holly Blue had the fresh skies of April in its wings, and the Common Blue the midsummer brightness of June. Most brilliant and burnished of all is the colour of the Clifden Blue, a local but not uncommon butterfly of southern hills, where, too, the dusky Small or Bed- ford Blue is often to be found, dancing or drowsing, among the wild down hay-crop of June. The common Brown Argus is a little Blue that is no blue, but has the upper surface of its wings of a rich, dark brown, with a border of orange dots ; the male of the Common Blue is also much smaller and duskier than the female, but it has always a bluish-purple gloss in the middle of the wing which distinguishes it from the Brown Argus, 14 SOME ENGLISH BUTTERFLIES often seen dancing beside it on the same fields and hill- sides. From late May to the time of the autumn frosts the fields and healthy places are also brightened by the Small Copper, a kind of fox-terrier among butterflies, inquisitive, pugnacious, and full of vigour and brisk attractiveness. Sometimes in the heat of the dogdays, when the hay is all carried and the dewless meadows parched and bare, the Common Blues and Coppers wander forth from their usual haunts, and may be seen exploring the unwonted closes of lawns and gar- dens, in quest of the measure of moist coolness which they need. For though butterflies are such lovers of sunshine, their delicate lives cannot endure the abso- lute drought of the desert ; and in the fieriest July weather the beautiful sight may often be seen of a thirsty cloud of Blues or Whites fluttering and settling on a wet patch where water has been spilt in the dusty roadway, or at the moist edge of a pool or running stream. Deep in the southern oakwoods in July the great Purple Emperors hold court round the airy crests of the boughs, amid a silence so songless and solemn that the rustle of their own high, flashing wings may sometimes be heard in the sunshine above the murmur of omni- present insect life that is the warp and woof of the still- ness. There is indeed a majesty about the soaring, indifferent flight of this brilliant butterfly of the forest 15 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES solitudes which sets it apart on a regal pinnacle of dis- tinction ; only the Swallowtail can equal it in its con- scious supremacy, its indifferent joy in spacious flight, and even the Swallowtail does not aspire to haunt for hours and days together only the loftiest, sky-fronting pinnacles of the oaks. As for the common reproach that the high-soaring Purple Emperor can be lured to earth by any carrion bait, provided it be corrupt and filthy enough, the accusation gains most of its force from the very unworthiness of its defamation. So far as it is true, it only deserves to be overlooked and unrecorded ; and in point of fact, as little heed will commonly be paid by a court of Purple Emperors to any earth-born carrion that may defile the low shore of the wood be- neath them as by the white clouds of heaven, afloat a little above. As July passes into August, the whole fashion of nature takes a deeper and statelier range. The charac- teristic butterflies of latest summer and early autumn are those species of large size and rich depth of colour, of which the residue outsleep the dark interval of win- ter, to appear in the sunshine of the reviving year. Through August and September the deep red wings of the Peacocks, Tortoiseshells and their kin assemble in regal troops on the large flowers of later summer in the gardens, or on a few well-loved blossoms of the field or streamside, such as the tall hemp agrimony of 16 SOME ENGLISH BUTTERFLIES the reed beds, with its mauve, cottony plumes, the mar- joram flower of the wide thyme-scented downs, and, most of all, on the pale purple, nodding scabious of the autumn pastures and dry slopes. The most splen- did butterfly picture of all the year is one of these wide September hillsides of purple scabious blossom thronged and crowded with the floating and fanning wings of hundreds of butterflies of a dozen different species, varying in hue from cool pure white to the Red Admiral's scarlet-bordered jet, and from the fresh radiance of the Blues and Coppers to the glowing, patterned splendour of the Peacocks and Tortoiseshells and Painted Ladies. Here a blossom bows beneath the weight of a silky-bodied Brimstone, there a Clouded Yellow flashes its rich saffron against the dark, earthy under-side of the strangely fretted wings of a Comma. Dragonflies cruise and hover over the length of the hillside meadow, grasshoppers spring and chirr among the hair-poised blossoms, and a busy plebeian crowd of hive and bumble bees shoulder the butterflies rudely from their foothold upon the mauve button-like heads. Far and wide, where the indivi- dual blossoms of the scabious melt into a purple haze, the wings of this great company of butterflies shift and flash from moment to moment as they probe the honeyed flowers ; one keen wing-profile, or brilliant eye-pat- tern, after another, catches the sight across the purple 17 2 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES shimmer of the field, and only rarely this absorbing insect concentration is broken for a moment as a bril- liant Peacock or Red Admiral leaves its last blossom and skims down the length of the slope, to fall again to the nectar of the scabious bloom. The long days of mellow September sunshine will soon be over, and all the brilliant butterfly congregation scattered and dis- hevelled in the storm and rain ; scarcely, in the rare interludes of October warmth and brightness, will the last Red Admirals be seen bickering with sluggish wasps and outcast and perishing drones over the open- ing clusters of the autumn ivy-blossom. Let us take farewell of the butterflies in the brilliant scabious meadow of September, as they fill it with their beauty and life, and not seek to follow them further into the darkness and cold. For indeed the tombs of such of them as die are as unknown as the sepulchre of Moses ; and those that sleep out the long sleep into the spring we may hope to see again, heralding the elfin cycle of the butterflies' year under a new and a lengthening sun. 18 THE BEE MIND II THE BEE MINT) " Oh wonderful ! Hath the All- Wise Creator plac'd such Wis- dom, such Curious Art, such Fortitude and Foresight, so Polite a Government ... in Creatures so small as the Bees ! " — JOSEPH WARDER. THERE is no familiarizing the honey bee. I never take the quilt off those glistening combs without a slight feeling of awe — it is as if one were opening the door of a chamber of mystery, stealing across the threshold into a place unknown, darkly wonderful. But the mysteries of the bee do not blind us to the plain fact that her intelligence runs in grooves ; is of a strictly limited character. Of this there have been fresh illus- trations during swarming time. By the side of the overcrowded hive, out of which the old queen comes, with her great following, is often an empty hive, admirably suited to the new monarchy — or republic — for, despite tradition, it more nearly resembles a republic. Often, before the swarm comes forth, this vacant hive has been long and critically 21 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES examined by many bees, apparently explorers. Yet how seldom is it chosen and occupied without the guid- ance of the bee master ! Instead of going into this hive, ranged and ready for them, the swarm will settle in a cluster on a tree or bush — by the river Lam- bourne, I found and all but trod on a swarm in a faggot — and will finally establish themselves, if they are not taken charge of, in the roof of a house or the hollow of a tree. But only introduce them to the beehive which — in s vain — their explorers have examined, and which they themselves have passed a hundred times a day, and they will joyously run up the alighting board, jostle in at the entrance, and then and there take possession of the very spot that they need for founding their State in. If their intelligence had anything like affinity to human reasoning power, surely the swarm, on emerging with their queen, would go straight into that empty hive with its hanging row of bar-frames, each support- ing a sheet of wax ready to work out into cells. In- stead, the bees will waste a precious day or more at the height of the honey flow, examining, re-examining, some crevices about a wall or roof, which are not the least good to them. I have seen it mentioned as a sign of the bee's wisdom that the swarm coming forth will often fly several miles away from their old home — 22 BEES. From a photograph by F. Martin Duncan, F.R.P.S. THE BEE MIND as proof that the bee does not wish to overcrowd a neighbourhood. But, if so, why, when the swarm is shaken down in the cool of the evening on a white sheet outside the empty hive, do the bees promptly crowd up, with all the music of satisfaction, carrying their queen with them, and take possession ? No — the bee intelligence is strictly circumscribed. What we term " reasoning power " does not seem to exist among bees. The arrangement, the order of their State is marvellously beautiful. The spirit of the hive is beyond praise in its devotion, discipline, endurance, fiery patriotism. But here end the virtues of the bee. Compared with those qualities her intellect is beneath contempt. Her machinery of mind cannot move outside the deep worn grooves of habit, which I suppose were slowly made — geologically slow — in the unreckoned thousands (or should it be millions ?) of years of her unknown history — for one cannot doubt that this is one of the most ancient civilizations in the world to-day — it may even be the most ancient. GHOST MOTH EVENINGS Ill GHOST MOTH EVENINGS " The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow ; The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow." — SHELLEY. I FIND the difficulty at midsummer is not to avoid repeating one's observations of living things, and of sky, sea, and landscapes ; rather, it is so hard to fix the thought and eye on the same things in successive Junes. No risk, indeed, of going over old ground in detail at this season ! The subject-matter of Nature is so inex- haustible, the time so tantalizingly little in which to examine and enjoy it, that the tendency is to turn here and there, to press on always to a fresh thing each June, instead of concentrating on what we attended to this time last year. Out of the great treasuries of these wild-rose days, treasuries of song, scent, colour, and life manifested in most exquisite forms, we are always tempted to choose some new thing. But there are certain June episodes that, once noticed, 27 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES will be looked for season after season with lively interest. One is the dance at dusk of the ghost moth. Last year this was kept up in the tranquil evenings of the second fortnight in June, and it continued well into July. The dance is now again at its height in the meadows. It has taken place of late on evenings that closely recall those of last June : the same calm, the same scented breath of the evening just before hay harvest — the partridge plaint — the crooning of night-jars — the peepy notes of the latest song thrush at a few minutes after nine o'clock ; only a change in planets, Venus burning in the tinted west instead of the taper of Mars in the blue. The clock of the moths, like that of the birds, must surely have minute, if not second, hands. After watching and waiting for the ghost moths' appearance oif two successive evenings, we may on the third even- ing reckon almost to a minute — if the weather is of the same character — when they will come whirring out of the long, thick meadow grasses. At ten minutes past nine, I found most of the ghost moths oscillating in the meadow. Next night at nine o'clock not a ghost moth was to be seen, though here and there its relative and frequent companions in the meadows, the common swift moth, was whizzing through the grasses. But ten minutes later a male ghost moth came up ; there 28 GHOST MOTH EVENINGS was an interval of a minute or so, and then, all at once, the corner of the field was full of ghost moths, satin- white male and brown female. I could count nearly a score on a small patch of ground a dozen square yards in extent, and could hear others impatiently whirring deep down in the tangled grasses as they tried to rise on the wing. One evening the dance had ended at half-past nine. Every moth had dropped into the grass depths and run a little way up a stem, and there it would be hanging till after nine o'clock next evening — unless by any chance the ghost moths dance again in the dusk of the morning — a twenty-four hour rest. My impression is — though I am not sure — that the ghost moths' dance only takes place once in each twenty-four hours, and lasts each time less than an hour. As they dance over the meadow grasses, there seems little or no rivalry among the male moths ; at most, they will now and again brush each other lightly ; it is here as if each were far too engrossed in his own move- ments to trouble about neighbours or rivals. But of late I have noticed a curious variant of the usual ghost moth dance over the grass heads. At the corner of the field is a small lime tree, and round this a dozen males were playing one evening. Instead of swinging from side to side, as one might expect, they here rose up and down, and whisked in and out among the leaves"; 29 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES now a moth would be near the top of the tree, and now he would be down within two yards or so of the ground ; this was more like the rise and drop of the winter gnats in column than the meadow swinging of the ghost moth. But the oddest feature in this tree variation was the attention two [male moths would pay each other. Whether it were rivalry, or whether insect sport and game, I could not say. Two moths would pursue each other — apparently now one, now the other, being pursuer — up and down, and even in and out among the outer leaves of the tree. They would lose each other in these chases, but find each other — actually distinguish each other among several ghost moths — and give chase again in a few moments. Constantly they would collide, brush against or tap one another, and at each tap the lovely gloss of the wings, perhaps the fine brown fur of the tippet, too, must have lost a little. As to the female ghost moths, I did not see them engaging in this dainty play, though several were hovering over the grasses. The female's movements slightly differ from the male's. From what I have seen, I cannot think she is attracted by the liveliest male dancer or the largest — in size the males differ much — or the most satiny, exacting or nice in her choice of a lover ; and more, I now have some doubts whether the male seeks and finds his lady by eyesight at all. 30 GHOST MOTH EVENINGS Another time I hope to touch on this theme, obscure, but deeply interesting. My attention was first drawn to it by a correspondent at Loughborough last summer. If eyesight play no great part in this extraordinary performance, why all the beauty show ? THE RAILWAY EMBANKMENT 33 IV THE RAILWAY EMBANKMENT " With her a sweet companion came, One alway smiling — ' Peace ! ' she said." — WILLIAM H. DAVIES. LANDSCAPES and gardens we do not want to have all to ourselves ; companions may often help us to their full enjoyment. But to watch wild life in the finer line and shade, freedom from intrusion is a great thing. The unsympathetic stranger is embarrassing. Figures and voices of wayfarers, even of toilers in the field or wood — much more of holiday-makers — should belong to the distance, be embraced in a kind of bird's-eye view. If, however, the occasional passer-by does not actually encroach on our preserve, is unconscious even of our existence, he may be almost welcome. To a hermit behind a hedge, the footfall of a passer-by can be quite agreeable : it may add something to the triumph of solitude to feel that we are in such complete seclusion that even a wayfarer a few yards off goes by without suspecting our presence. 35 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES It is this seclusion that often makes the lower part of the railway embankment, screened by a splendid hawthorn hedge, such an excellent spot in summer. There are stiles and footpaths close to, perhaps along- side, these hedges, but the railway ground remains absolutely private. The trains above take nothing from the privacy of the place : lying on the slope or walking among the June grass and ox-eye daisies by the hedgeside, one sees hardly anything of them. Their noise does not distress us ; the grand thunder and the shake of trains at these close quarters is good rather than otherwise. I doubt whether it jars even on sensitive nerves. Besides, we can grow accus- tomed to this sound so soon that, after a short experi- ence, train after train may roar by without our noticing them. It may be the same with wild animals. The pipit or yellow-hammer perched on the telegraph wire does not stir for the fastest, loudest express. I have seen the beautiful little merlin equally unconcerned. Is he conscious, indeed, of its passing ? I have heard that nightingales haunting wooded places by railway lines will sing persistently all night, and I seem to have noticed how long and choicely the railway nightingales sing in Kent. A friend says he thinks it is because they cannot sleep through the noise of the goods trains crashing and thundering all night. Noise is a stimulant to song with birds, and I have 36 THE RAILWAY EMBANKMENT suggested that it may be the river which makes the sedge warbler so songful by night and day. But it is just worth considering as a theory, not more. The railway embankment is as favoured by butter- flies and day-flying moths this June as I found it last year. The lovely little heath moth has been out in numbers since the beginning of the month. It has none of the brave apparel of the wood tiger and the cinnabar moths which also fly by day along the slope, being a greyish little thing, flaccid almost as the snow- white plume moth, but far warier than he. The pattern on the upper wings of the heath, yellowish with wavy brown stripes, is neat as neat can be : to describe it truly you want language fine and pointed as an etching pen, a tongue of diminutives. The flight of the heath moth is not so weak as one might expect from such limp-looking wings and body, but it is highly erratic, like that of many moths and butterflies with thin bodies and wings that seem as if they had no muscles to work them. Like the " car- pet " moths and notably the orange-tip and the white butterflies, the heath moth zigzags along. The move- ments, on the wing, of an orange-tip butterfly and a small bird — say a chaffinch — or a larger one — say a green woodpecker — are so entirely unlike that one may wonder whether the same principles are here at work. The bird seems to bound through the air in a clean 37 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES curve, the butterfly apparently can only go forward by quick little flutterings to right and left : to make progress the orange-tip or cabbage white must cease- lessly bob from side to side. With the butterfly we see nothing of the springs, the rise and fall of the body in the air, the clean, distinct closing of the wings be- tween the leaps. The heath moth and the orange-tip butterfly get along somehow, can fly against a little breeze, as with it, but there really seems — and here, of course, is decep- tion— to be no more machinery about their flight than about that of a flimsy scrap of paper upheld and buf- feted about by gusts of wind. This is not so with all moths and butterflies, nor with beetles on the wing, many flying clean and straight. Another curious style of flight is to be seen on the railway slope. Mother Shipton's likeness is out, and when she flies her wings appear half open, half closed. It is the same exactly with several of the skipper butterflies, and with the much larger grayling butterfly. But to my eyes the butterfly gem of the railway slope in early June is the tiniest of them all. This is the Bedford blue, which is to butterflies what the golden crowned wren is to birds. Last year I saw him out in May ; this year, early in June. Though so minute, he is a butterfly every line of him — you must measure him by lines not inches — far more so than the skippers, 38 THE RAILWAY EMBANKMENT which only pass muster as butterflies because they have, for hall-mark, the club at the tip of the antennae or horn, which no moth can show. The Bedford blue is not brightly coloured like several of1 his larger rela- tives— has just a little dust of blue on a brownish ground, and his wings on the under-side are ash grey with a thought of blue about them. But they are cut to a dainty shape, and fringed with white or grey — I cannot make up my mind which, watching him sun- ning himself on a grass blade. Nimble on the wing, alert, so spruce in his whole turnout, this blue is a fascinating little thing to see. I have not yet found him on his bed, but I suspect he sleeps, like the common blue, head downward and upper wings laid back so that only the tips show above the under wings. Probably he assimilates with environ- ment then more closely than the common blue, Alexis, or is less noticeable not only through his smaller figure, but through the spots — held in tiny rings — on the under- side being less striking than those of his big cousin. 39 BUTTERFLIES IN BED V BUTTERFLIES IN BED " On the Infinitely Little." THE grassy, heathery clearing in the Surrey birch wood has been the playground of butterflies for weeks past. A few battered meadow-brown butterflies of July, their poor wings worn as jagged as those of the comma, linger on, but their junketings are nearly over. The Ringlet and the Large Heath butterflies succeeded them before the end of the month, and occupy the bramble- bushes by day and night. Last year, though I pryed closely in their woodland haunts in another district — among hazel, oak, and brake fern — I could find very few Large Heath butterflies settled for the night. Lately I have discovered many on the bramble-bushes in the birch wood. Like Meadow Brown, Grayling, and other butterflies, the Large Heath, settling for the evening and night, always draws down its folded upper wings, so that the conspicuous spot or eye on the back of them is hid. One effect Jpf this is to make 43 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES the Large Heath a trifle obscurer at rest on the bram- ble leaf than it would be with the wing up. But I do not believe the real explanation or object of this withdrawal of the " eye " from public view is protection of the butterfly from enemies of prey by inconspicuity, or by assimilation to surroundings (gross words to use of a sylph like the Large Heath ! but I know not how to avoid them here). My notion is that there is no night enemy that need be cheated — if it could be cheated thus. Protection of butterfly beauty against weather — this, I think, is the meaning of the withdrawn " eye." I admit that, if you set out to look for butterflies at rest and matching their environment, you will find them. The Small Skipper butterfly sleeping on the spear-thistle looked greeny- grey, I noticed, matching his perch. We watched a Meadow Brown, disturbed by large raindrops, perch on a birch twig, and put away his " eye," and we agreed he would pass for a dead leaf. But other Small Skip- pers, small and large kinds, slept on seeding grass heads and the matching was not close ; and, after all, is a Meadow Brown so very like a dead birch leaf when you come to think of it ? More striking was the case of the Golden Y moth, the pretty insect which is out in moist places in the birch wood, and flies often by day. I watched one settle on the trunk of a birch tree. It has some dark 44 BUTTERFLIES IN BED fluff or fur, that stands out like a hump or excrescence on the back, which really does remind one of the dark, rough cork of the birch trunk near the ground. If this were the usual resting-place of Golden Y, it would seem very like a matching precaution ; but there is no evidence to speak of that Golden Y moths prefer for sleeping quarters the rough, corky trunk of the birches ; I think my moth settled thereon by chance. I found him first amid the copse grasses and cross- leaved heather, and I found another Golden Y moth next day resting off the birch trunk in the under- cover of the wood. In the lane end are still a few Silver-spotted Blue butterflies, sucking the bird's-foot trefoil and the bramble-blossoms : a month ago there were dozens. The Silver-spotted, with lilac-blue wings and their clear fringe of white, is quite as lovely a little flyer as the Common Blue butterfly ; indeed, in minutiae — and perhaps because he is not so common ! — I think him the choicer of the two. Of the sleeping quarters and habits of this gay beauty I know little yet ; one or two I found at rest slept head upward, not like the Common Blue their near relative head downward ; but perhaps this was exceptional, due to some chance disturbance — I can hardly imagine the sleeping habits of the Common Blue differ from those of his first cousin. Nobody could doubt that to watch butterflies and 45 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES moths is to train the eye to beauty on a scale of ex- quisite, if tiny, perfection ; this is absolutely plain'to every seeing, thinking man. But a study of the habits, minutiae of minutiae, of such little things — how can this avail human beings ? it may be asked. Is not the man who does it rather like Browning's grammarian, who fiddled away his life on Greek enclitics and particles, holding forth on them till he was dead from his feet to his waist ? Would it not be wiser to aim at the mil- lion and chance missing the unit ? Yes, but in these units secrets of life — secrets of whence, whither, why — are concentrated. In the end we may know ourselves through a blue butterfly. Only we must watch and record, utterly careless of any theory ; if this butter- fly's nightdress does not mimic its surroundings, we must accept the fact, careless of theory. Theory is a feather-weight set in the scale against truth, a matter of supreme unconcern. PEARL SKIPPERS 47 VI PE^ARL SKIPPERS "The fly buzz'd up in the heat." PUNCTUAL almost to a day I found my lovely little pearl skippers at their prime on the hillside where I watched them last August. Roughly, pearl skipper is large skipper, plus a set of natty, four-sided figures tessellated work, that are imprinted on the upper and under sides of his wings. These light-coloured marks — had the naming of the butterfly been mine, I should not have suggested pearls — are his chief distinction, but I fancy he also differs slightly from the large skip- per in size and in one or two finer details. I have only seen him alive — so alive too ! — on his native down ; never in the cork-lined box, nor wish to ; and he is not very easy to get quite close to ; but, judging by what I have seen of him on a blossom about a yard off, his horns are not ringed with white, and he wants the faint flush of purple on the lower wings which his cousin has. 49 4 BRITISH BUTTERFLIES He is a gem, though he does not flash with gemmy colours ; is of the live bijoutry of nature. He flies in the fizzling heat of an out and out August day ; whips from flower to flower, mixing the nectar of birdsfoot trefoil with the nectar of hawk-bit ; and, after a few sips, will settle on the ground or on a leaf, draw-to those muscular little wings, clean horns with legs, and unroll and clean his trunk too. He is scrupulous in this as are most butterflies. Comfort, not cleanliness for its own virtuous sake, and not fastidiousness or nicety, is the secret of all this wiping of trunk and horns, and perhaps of face, too, after a course of sweetmeats. All the same, it is a very pretty thing to see the pearl skipper purify himself between the feasts. Then, whisk ! — he is up and off, chasing or chased by another pearl skipper at such a hot pace that the eye cannot always follow the com.' bat ants or lovers, whichever they be. Pearl skipper and large skipper, which we might call blood relations, first cousins even — though, unlike first cousins in human relationship, they are not suffered by Nature to intermarry — have come from some common ancestor — have evolved, if this term says more. I cannot understand how any one can doubt that these two skippers, that all the skippers, were at the start one skipper ; or the blue butterflies or arguses one blue butterfly or one argus ; that is to say, 50 PEARL SKIPPERS one kind of skipper, argus or blue. That these forms of life began separately and independently of each other is unthinkable. No ; the pearl skipper and the large skipper were evolved and distinguished by gradual creation. But what exactly gave the one his pearls and denied him white rings on the antennae or horns ; what gave the other his white rings but denied him the pearls ? Here is a riddle as unguessed as that of the making of An- tares and Arcturus, the great ruby and amber stars of these August evenings. Half the secrets of life and evolution lie in epitome in this dot of a butterfly. Common sense tells us the skippers evolved through a common ancestor. But darkness follows on this glim- mer of light. Why and how pearls for the pearl skip- per ? Nothing in food, habit of life, or haunt gives the clue. Take the pearl skipper to pieces, put him under the most powerful microscope, and I doubt whether his physiology will help you forward in the least. Here theory comes in with the general principle by which pearl skipper took one branch road, larger skipper another, on the map of life. But, unfortunately, it cannot offer a tittle of evidence as to this particular case of pearls and rings ; and it leaves one unsatisfied. The pearl skipper's path of evolution and the purpose served by his travelling this path are darkly hid away. 51 ANAX IMPERATOR 53 VII AN AX IMPER