‘No, that’s not it. I’ve found plenty of them; the root sticks in the ground, and the caterpillar is on the end of it, standing up like fruit on a tree. The caterpillar sees the young rata-tree sprouting, and swallowing the end of it, gets stuck fast—the end of the plant swelling in its mouth. The plant goes on growing, and the caterpillar gets shoved up in the air end on.’
A tourist who was there said that a Maori told him that the caterpillar ate the seed, and then it germinated.
Here Mac broke in with the remark, that if it chewed the seed, the seed could not germinate.
The tourist seemed annoyed, and said:
‘Well, sir, it doesn’t eat it, but it swallows it like a Cockle’s pill, and then it germinates. The body of the caterpillar becomes a flower-pot for the plant, which grows until it has exhausted the contents of its friend, and then both of them die. The caterpillar is neither up nor down, but it lies horizontally with the plant sticking out of its mouth.’
Here we appealed to the specimens, and pointed at the fact that the plant might come out of the tail of the animal or the back of its neck; but it was certain that it did not come out of its mouth.
‘Everybody gets mixed about them inseks,’ said a gentleman in a flannel shirt, who had been listening to the argument. ‘The way they comes to be as they is, is because they’ve been stuck in when you sees them. It’s a sandpiper as does it. The sandpiper builds in rata-trees, and, just to ornament the surroundings, fills up its spare time in sticking caterpillars on the branches. I’ve seen a sandpiper and its mate in two hours cover a tree so thick that you couldn’t see the sky for caterpillars.’
By this time I had learnt that a caterpillar did something with the rata-seed, or else the rata-seed did something with a caterpillar, or else a sandpiper——here I got mixed.
But rata-trees begin to grow from the tops of other trees! Perhaps our zoophyte was found suspended in the air like fruit. Altogether it was as mysterious as a mermaid. Somehow or other, I don’t think it has anything to do with rata-trees. Caterpillars do not take pills. Possibly they may take in the spores of a fungus which use the stomach of their host as a flower-pot.
Another curious object for the naturalist was a plant called Pisonia something or other. A friend of mine had one in his garden, and he gave me some seeds. The peculiarity of this plant is that it catches birds. The way in which this is done is by its having seed-pods covered with a kind of birdlime. Insects stick on the birdlime, and sparrows and other feathered pets coming for a feed, get stuck themselves. Cats then go round and catch the sparrows. I never heard of the tree catching cats. I am sorry I never made inquiries.