Pewit
Worst of all birds that can have no peace in their lives so long as you are in sight is the pewit. The harsh wailing sound of his crying voice as he wheels about overhead, the mad downward rushes, when his wings creak as he nears you, give the idea that he is almost crazed with anxiety; and one feels ashamed at causing so much misery. Oh, poor bird! is there no way to make you understand without leaving the ground, that your black-spotted, olive-coloured eggs are perfectly safe; that a man can walk about on the heath and be no more harmful to you than the Forest ponies, and the ragged donkey browsing on a furze bush, and the cow with her tinkling bell? I stand motionless, looking the other way; I sit down to think; I lie flat on my back with hands clasped behind my head, and gaze at the sky, and still the trouble goes on—he will not believe in me, nor tolerate me. There is nothing to do but get up and go away out of sight and sound of the pewits.
It appears to me that this sympathy for the lower animals is very much a matter of association—an overflow of that regard for the rights of and compassion for others of our kind which are at the foundations of the social instinct. The bird is a red- and a warm-blooded being—we have seen that its blood is red, and when we take a living bird in our hands we feel its warmth and the throbbing of its breast: therefore birds are related to us, and with that red human blood they have human passions. Witness the pewit—the mother bird, when you have discovered or have come near her downy little one—could any human mother, torn with the fear of losing her babe, show her unquiet and disturbed state in a plainer, more understandable way! But in the case of creatures of another division in the kingdom of life—non-vertebrates, without sensible heat, and with a thin colourless fluid instead of red blood, as if like plants they had only a vegetative life—this sympathy is not felt as a rule. When, in some exceptional case, the feeling is there, it is because some human association has come into the mind in spite of the differences between insect and man.
Walking on this heath I saw a common green grasshopper, disturbed at my step, leap away, and by chance land in a geometric web in a small furze bush. Caught in the web, it began kicking with its long hind legs, and would in three seconds have made its escape. But mark what happened. Directly over the web, and above the kicking grasshopper, there was a small, web-made, thimble-shaped shelter, mouth down, fastened to a spray, and the spider was sitting in it. And looking down it must have seen and known that the grasshopper was far too big and strong to be held in that frailest snare, that it would be gone in a moment and the net torn to pieces. It also must have seen and known that it was no wasp nor dangerous insect of any kind; and so, instantly, straight and swift as a leaden plummet, it dropped out of the silvery bell it lived in on to the grasshopper and attacked it at the head. The falces were probably thrust into the body between the head and pro-thorax, for almost instantly the struggle ceased, and in less than three seconds the victim appeared perfectly dead.
Grasshopper and spider
What interested me in this sight was the spider, an Epeira of a species I had never closely looked at before, a little less in size than our famous Epeira diadema—our common garden spider, with the pretty white diadem on its velvety, brown abdomen. This heath spider was creamy-white in colour, the white deepening to warm buff all round at the sides, and to a deeper tint on the under surface. It was curiously and prettily coloured; and, being new to me, its image was vividly impressed on my mind.
As to what had happened, that did not impress me at all. I could not, like the late noble poet who cherished an extreme animosity against the spider, and inveighed against it in brilliant, inspired verse, remember and brood sadly on the thought of the fairy forms that are its victims—
The lovely births that winnow by,
Twin-sisters of the rainbow sky:
Elf-darlings, fluffy, bee-bright things,
And owl-white moths with mealy wings.
Nor could I, like him, break the creature's toils, nor take the dead from its gibbet, nor slay it on account of its desperate wickedness. These are mere house-bred feelings and fancies, perhaps morbid; he who walks out of doors with Nature, who sees life and death as sunlight and shadow, on witnessing such an incident wishes the captor a good appetite, and, passing on, thinks no more about it. For any day in summer, sitting by the water, or in a wood, or on the open heath, I note little incidents of this kind; they are always going on in thousands all about us, and one with trained eye cannot but see them; but no feeling is excited, no sympathy, and they are no sooner seen than forgotten. But, as I said, there are exceptional cases, and here is one which refers to an even more insignificant creature than a field grasshopper—a small dipterous insect—and yet I was strangely moved by it.
The insect was flying rather slowly by me over the heath—a thin, yellow-bodied, long-legged creature, a Tipula, about half as big as our familiar crane-fly. Now, as it flew by me about on a level with my thighs, up from the heath at my feet shot out a second insect, about the same size as the first, also a Dipteron, but of another family—one of the Asilidæ, which are rapacious. The Asilus was also very long-legged, and seizing the other with its legs, the two fell together to the ground. Stooping down, I witnessed the struggle. They were locked together, and I saw the attacking insect raise his head and the forepart of his body so as to strike, then plunge his rostrum like a dagger in the soft part of his victim's body. Again and again he raised and buried his weapon in the other, and the other still refused to die or to cease struggling. And this little fight and struggle of two flies curiously moved me, and for some time I could not get over the feeling of intense repugnance it excited. This feeling was wholly due to association: the dagger-like weapon and the action of the insect were curiously human-like, and I had seen just such a combat between two men, one fallen and the other on him, raising and striking down with his knife. Had I never witnessed such an incident, the two flies struggling, one killing the other, would have produced no such feeling, and would not have been remembered.