Compare with this the state of affairs revealed by Mr. Swynnerton’s observations. He worked for three and a half years, and, as his investigations extended to eighteen families of birds, they must have been very extensive. Exactly how extensive they have been we do not know, because he has not yet published them. Nevertheless, as the result of three and a half years’ watching and stomach examination he has evidence of only “nearly 800” attacks made by birds on insects; that is to say, on an average about two attacks in three days!
Watch a bee-eater feeding and you will see it take twenty or thirty insects in less than an hour. If you were to watch it one whole day you might see it capture 300 insects, but certainly not more than one of its victims, on an average, would be a butterfly. Yet, the theory of mimicry is based upon the assumption that butterflies are so greatly preyed upon by birds that they require special means of protection!
I ask all who are interested in the subject to be ever on the look-out for birds chasing butterflies or moths. These are so large and so easy to identify that there can be no chance of mistaking them. Even a casual observer, when watching a bird, cannot fail to notice the capture of a butterfly by it. And when a bird has captured a butterfly it cannot dispose of it very quickly. According to Mr. Swynnerton, “some (birds) swallow the insect (butterfly or moth) whole, but usually after masticating or beating it; some remove inconvenient portions by ‘worrying’ like a dog or beating against perch or ground; some grasp the prey in one foot and tear off the rejected portions with the bill, eating the rest piecemeal.”
The fact that the average bird has to go through all the above performances before devouring a creature containing so little nourishment as a butterfly, is sufficient to show that it does not pay birds to chase butterflies.
But it is best not to rely on arguments to refute the theories of persons who have no logic in them. The only way to destroy the pernicious zoological theories that hold the field at present is to pile up the facts that tell against them. Similarly, theories that are true cannot be established satisfactorily except by the accumulation of facts. The relations between birds and butterflies can be determined only by observation, and for that kind of observation no country presents a better field than India. Moreover, such observations can be conducted by people having little or no scientific knowledge.
XXXIX
VOICES OF THE NIGHT
The stillness of the Indian night suffers many interruptions.
In the vicinity of a town or village the hours of darkness are rendered hideous by the noises of human beings and of their appendages—the pariah dogs. In the jungle the “friendly silences of the moon” are continually disturbed by the bark of the fox, the yelling of the jackal, or the notes of the numerous birds of the night.
The call of the various nocturnal birds must be familiar to every person who has spent a hot weather in the plains of Northern India and slept night after night beneath the starry heavens. With the calls of the birds all are familiar, but some do not know the names of the originators of these sounds.
First and foremost of the fowls that lift up their voices after the shades of night have fallen are the tiny spotted owlets (Athene brama). Long before the sun has set these quaint little creatures emerge from the holes in which they have spent the day, and treat the neighbours to a “torrent of squeak and chatter and gibberish” which is like nothing else in the world, and which Tickell has attempted to syllabise as “Kucha, kwachee, kwachee, kwachee, kwachee,” uttered as rapidly as the little owlets’ breath will allow of. These noisy punchinellos are most vociferous during moonlit nights, but they are by no means silent in the dark portion of the month.