Who loves to lie with me
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird's throat:
Come hither, come hither, come hither."
A bird flies into the tree near by. A blue-tit, smartest of his race. He stands a moment on the edge of a hole in the level bough, looks round twice, then dives in and disappears. And out of that stronghold of his, snugly lined with moss, and hair, and feathers, he will not stir for you or any man. But yonder is a figure, in a tree some twenty yards away, from which perhaps even the bold blue-tit would fly in terror. A lithe brown creature is climbing leisurely out of a hole high up in the trunk—a weasel, searching for eggs, no doubt. Up the tree he goes, more lightly even than a squirrel, right to the very topmost branches. Now down he comes again, head first, and makes his way to another tree. As he canters lightly through the long grass he pauses now and then to rear on his hind legs and peer sharply round over the green jungle, looking for the moment, quite bird-like. Two more trees he climbs, searching every likely spot among the boughs, prying into every hole and cranny—clearly a birds'-nester born. A master of woodcraft, too, for when you move nearer for a better view, he vanishes. He is there all right, lying close behind some branch, no doubt; but he is as completely screened from sight as if he wore the magic cap of Perseus. He is a tiny figure at the most. The birds take no notice of him. The yellow-hammer goes on with his sleepy tune, and the greenfinch in the elm above him with his yet sleepier drawl, while a linnet in the tree near by sings undisturbed his sweet and dainty song, that in itself is like a gleam of sunshine.
The whole woodland is astir with life and movement and sweet sounds of song. Look at that bullfinch yonder, balanced on a spray of woodbine, that swings lightly beneath his weight. Leaning forward a little, with his black head turned slightly on one side, he picks off, as if in pure mischief, the dainty tufts that cluster on the branches near him, while the ruined leaves fall in a very shower. A beautiful figure. There is not in Nature a hue more lovely than the exquisite flush of crimson on his breast. Close by him, as if by way of foil to his perfect beauty, sit two sober-clad companions, dull and grey and colourless, yet to the full as mischievous as he.
Sunny spaces in the wood are filled with hovering insects, whose tiny figures rise and fall like motes in the warm air; beetles for the most part, not flies; small, black, long-bodied beetles, the very same that give us such annoyance by getting in our eyes in the twilight.
Butterflies cross and recross the clearing—some so brilliant in their whiteness that they almost suggest yet brighter gleams of sunshine. Some, again, are dark and sombre, and like patches of moving shadow. Now one brave in black and scarlet flashes past. Now one on wings of golden brown sails leisurely along. And some there are, small, sylph-like figures, that float lightly by, as blue as the unclouded heaven overhead. Some moths, too, are abroad, even at this hour and in this fierce sunshine—moths clad in the very softest tints, the most ethereal tones of fawn and grey, of brown and yellow. Some are without a mark on their pure colouring, and some are daintily pencilled with shell-like lines and bars. To and fro in the sunbeams, whose misty shafts slant through the thickets, hover a crowd of winged things—of great bees, black or yellow or tipped with fiery red, flies of many hues, beetles light and dark—and the sound of their multitudinous wings seems to fill the hot summer air. Insects make up no small part, perhaps even the larger part, of the life of the woodland.
The woods just now are swarming with caterpillars, many of which, perhaps even the majority, belong to the class called geometers, from the curious way in which they move along, arching their bodies in a fashion that reminds the observer of a man measuring a distance by "spanning" it with his hand. A much more curious point about them is their wonderful mimicry of the twigs of the tree on which they live: a fact which has earned for them the name of "stick" caterpillars. Their skins are the colour of the bark, their bodies have knots and markings exactly like twigs. And when one of them waits motionless, standing erect on its hinder set of feet—an attitude it can preserve for hours together, it looks so like a piece of stick that even a naturalist has related how he was about to prune a twig from one of his fruit trees, and had even touched it with his knife before he saw that it was not vegetable at all, but one of these "stick" caterpillars. One cannot help wondering if birds are taken in too.
The curious movements of these geometers are due to their comparatively scant supply of legs. There is an amusing ballad called "The Bishop and the Caterpillar," which describes, after the manner of "Ingoldsby," how a great dignitary of the Church inspected a village school. The children acquitted themselves well:—