CHANCES OF THE FIELD NATURALIST. CORRESPONDENT writes to Tuesday's Times
to chronicle the appearance on March 5th of the rare Camberwell Beauty butterfly in the woods of St. George's Hill, near Weybridge. Saturday last was a day of wonderful sunshine, and this butterfly, of course, was a hibernated specimen which may have spent the winter either close by the spot where it was seen, possibly in a faggot of brushwood, or may have come from some distance. The sunshine had warmed and wakened it thoroughly, so that it flew high over the pine-trees, and those who have tried to catch Camberwell Beauties in Switzerland or elsewhere know what a fine, strong flyer this butterfly is. It will be interesting to see whether other instances of its appearance in England are recorded ; whether 1910 will be a year in which only one or two Camber- well Beauties are seen, or whether there will be fairly large numbers, as there were in 1880 and 1900. We do not know, of course, whether the Camberwell Beauties seen in the spring in this country wintered here or on the Continent, so that the numbers seen in March, say, may really belong more properly to the English October of the previous year. In some years the season goes by without a single Camberwell Beauty being chronicled as a visitor. But whether the records of 1910 be few or plentiful, we are not likely to be visited as we were in that memorable year when Georgian entomologists named the butterfly the Grand Surprise. In that year-1767, probably, but the records are a little vague—it appeared "in prodigious numbers." The year 1819 was another great year, and in 1846 there were a good many seen in different parts of England. But the great majority of butterfly collectors doubtless go through their lives without having the good fortune to set eyes on a Camberwell Beauty in England. There is no going out to look for the butterfly; you might walk from March to October with a net and never see one, and might come home to find your neighbour's footman bringing one in with the logs for the fire. There is a story of an enthusiastic collector on his way to church who left his wife and family and rushed about the roads and fields pursuing a Camberwell Beauty with his top-bat ; and another pleasant story of surprise is of the delightful old clergyman-naturalist, the Rev. F. 0. Morris, who received one day "a fine specimen alive by the post, the donor being an entire stranger to me, and requesting me to acknowledge its due receipt to an old woman, post-office, Lockington,' which I accordingly did, with many thanks." The sighting of rare butterflies is one of those chances of the field and wood which may come to any one, but which do come, naturally enough, more often to those who are on the look-out for them, consciously or not. Obviously, entomolo- gists would be more likely than others to recognise moths or butterflies, just as the best anecdotes of birds, and clever animals like stoats and rats and badgers, come from people who have been watching them all their lives. Some of the sights which are really the commonest are very seldom seen; for instance, there must be thousands of eggs carried in their bills by cuckoos every day in the spring, and yet how many people do you meet who have seen a cuckoo with an egg in its mouth ? A less common sight which the present writer had the good fortune to witness last summer was a young cuckoo being fed by its own foster-parents, which were hedge-sparrows, and by another pair of birds, pied wagtails, which were apparently so strongly attracted by the hungry young creature that they spent the whole day for many days together helping the hedge-sparrows to cram the cuckoo with flies and caterpillars. Writers who have noticed this feeding of young cuckoos by birds which are not their foster-parents have been inclined to attribute the action to some special power of fascination possessed by the young cuckoo. But is it not equally probable that the second pair of voluntary foster-parents have also brought up, and lost, a young cuckoo P When a pair of birds bring up a yoang cuckoo, and it dies or gets killed, they lose their whole family instead of only one or two out of a brood as other birds might; and they may, perhaps, decide to adopt another baby,—possibly, even, to quarrel about it, like the women brought before Solomon. It may very likely be a common enough occurrence in any case, yet there are few instances actually recorded with dates and names. Rarer birds than cuckoos are equally carefully observed, yet not the most careful observer can be sure of
seeing what he wants. Those who are most familiar with woodcock may go many years without having the luck to see the parent carrying her young between her legs to the feeding- ground, and yet that probably is a habit of every woodcock with a nest.
Fights between animals are some of the more interesting of the field chances, and some of the best fighters are fish. They may very well die when what was meant to be a meal ends in a fight for life, as in the case of a pike seizing and swallow- ing a swan's head, and both being killed. Captain Salvia has recorded a wonderful fight which he saw in a pond in Stoke Park, near Guildford, between a tame otter and a pike ; the otter weighed eighteen pounds, and the pike twenty pounds eleven ounces, and after a fearful struggle the otter actually got the pike out on the bank. Mr. J. G. Millais in his "British Mammals" has a story of an otter which took a roach under water, the roach having just been hooked by a fisherman ; the fight then resolved itself into a pulling match between the otter with the fish and the angler with a light line, and of course the otter went off with the line. Every fly-fisher, probably, is familiar with the sudden tug at the gut trace behind him, and the distressing knowledge that a swallow or a bat has gone off with his fly; and doubtless most
sea-fishermen are equally accustomed to the unhappy process of trying to unhook a gull which has taken the spinner trailed behind the boat for mackerel. One day, fishing off the coast of South Wales, the writer was afraid lest he should hook a seal. The seal was fishing in the same shoal of bass, in quite a friendly way, and every now and then its grey head would come up within a few yards of the boat; then, when the bait spun behind the boat hooked its fish, the seal would come up near the splashing bass, apparently attracted by the commotion. So heavy a creature would have broken the line almost without noticing it; but other animals can be hooked, and give both themselves and the angler a terrible amount of trouble. The writer was talking last autumn to a fisherman of many years' experience, who surprised him by remarking quietly that he supposed no man who fished much would come to his age without having hooked one or more dogs. It would be by accident, he explained; a. shepherd's dog passing behind unknown to him, perhaps. Once he hooked a dog on particularly strong tackle, and it took him a long time to get the dog in ; when the dog ran ho had to run too. Another time he had left his rod stuck upright in the ground, a swallow bad taken the fly, and a cat took the swallow ; it got into a horrible tangle with the gut, and then climbed a tree. It was a pet cat, and its owner was perfectly furious. But the best story of a fight with a fish is another fisherman's, and he never saw the fight. A piece of boiled salmon came to the table, part evidently of a very large fish. One of the diners examined his helping with surprise, held up something, and asked what it was. It was the talon of an osprey, and evidently the great bird had struck at a fish too large to lift from the water ; there must have been a terrific struggle, ending with the fish diving and dragging the talon from the bird's foot.
Observant gamekeepers have more chances than most men of seeing strange things, and one of Mr. Millais's stories of a gamekeeper attributes extraordinary cleverness to a badger. The man had found himself unable to trap a peculiarly per- sistent beast, which somehow managed to spring the trap without ever leaving more than a few hairs in it. So he placed a dead rook in the centre of a ring of traps, and waited by the traps to watch what happened. The badger duly came, looked at the rook, sniffed at the trap, turned a somersault over the trap, and took the rook ; the trap was sprung, but could not close on the badger's broad back. Stories of other clever creatures like stoats, which curl themselves into belie and roll down banks, need not be disbelieved, even if they have few witnesses ; it is a question always of the veracity of the witness, rather than the curiosity of the chance sight witnessed. If one set of improbable travellers' tales about animals is to be selected out of many as vouched for by competent witnesses, it would be, surely, the set of stories about pumas which Mr. W. H. Hudson has collected into his " Naturalist in La Plata." The idea of a. huge, bloodthirsty wild cat naturally friendly to man, amigo del Cristiano, as the Spaniards call it; a creature which will even protect a wounded man from a jaguar, and which, if it sees a man is going to kill it, does not resist, but sits down trembling, with the tears pouring from its eyes,—it sounds entirely.
incredible ; or would if we did not recollect " The Walrus and the Carpenter." But Mr. Hudson has questioned scores of hunters on the point, and they all agree; and Mr. Hudson himself believes their accounts to be true. That would be the best of reasons for believing it with him. Yet the same beast which will quietly submit to death at the hands of man is one of the strongest and most savage beasts in the world, and a great difficulty to the stockbreeder when it is not kept down. It is particularly fond of horseflesh, and kills its victim by a wrench which dislocates the neck.
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