One summer afternoon I was visiting at the parsonage in a small New Forest village in this low district when my host introduced me to a friend of his the vicar of a neighbouring parish, remarking when he did so that I would be delighted to know him as he was a great naturalist. The gentleman smiled, and said he was not a "great naturalist," but only a "lepidopterist." Now it happened that just then I had a lovely picture in my mind, the vivid image of a humming-bird hawk-moth seen suspended on his misty wings among the tall flowers in the brilliant August sunshine. I had looked on it but a little while ago, and thought it one of the most beautiful things in nature; naturally on meeting a lepidopterist I told him what I had seen, and something of the feeling the sight had inspired in me. He smiled again, and remarked that the season had not proved a very good one for the Macroglossa stellatarum. He had, so far, seen only three specimens; the first two he had easily secured, as he fortunately had his butterfly net when he saw them. But the third!—he hadn't his net then; he was visiting one of his old women, and was sitting in her garden behind the cottage talking to her when the moth suddenly made its appearance, and began sucking at the flowers within a yard of his chair. He knew that in a few moments it would be gone for ever, but fortunately from long practice, and a natural quickness and dexterity, he could take any insect that came within reach of his hand, however wild and swift it might be. "So!"—the parson lepidopterist explained, suddenly dashing out his arm, then slowly opening his closed hand to exhibit the imaginary insect he had captured. Well, he got the moth after all! And thus owing to his quickness and dexterity all three specimens had been secured.
I, being no entomologist but only a simple person whose interest and pleasure in insect life the entomologist would regard as quite purposeless—I felt like a little boy who had been sharply rebuked or boxed on the ear. This same lepidopterist may be dead now, although a couple of summers ago he looked remarkably well and in the prime of life; but I see that someone else is now parson of his parish. I have not taken the pains to inquire; but, dead or alive, I cannot imagine him, in that beautiful country of the Future which he perhaps spoke about to the old cottage woman—I cannot imagine him in white raiment, with a golden harp in his hand; for if here, in this country, he could see nothing in a hummingbird hawk-moth among the flowers in the sunshine but an object to be collected, what in the name of wonder will he have to harp about!
The humming-bird hawk, owing to its diurnal habits, may be seen by anyone at its best; but as to the other species that equal and surpass it in lustre, their beauty, so far as man is concerned, is all wasted on the evening gloom. They appear suddenly, are vaguely seen for a few moments, then vanish; and instead of the clear-cut, beautiful form, the rich and delicate colouring and airy, graceful motions, there is only a dim image of a moving grey or brown something which has passed before us. And some of the very best are not to be seen even as vague shapes and as shadows. What an experience it would be to look on the death's-head moth in a state of nature, feeding among the flowers in the early evening, with some sunlight to show the delicate grey-blue markings and mottlings of the upper- and the indescribable yellow of the under-wings—is there in all nature so soft and lovely a hue? Even to see it alive in the only way we are able to do, confined in a box in which we have hatched it from a chrysalis dug up in the potato patch and bought for sixpence from a workman, to look on it so and then at its portrait—for artists and illustrators have been trying to do it these hundred years—is almost enough to make one hate their art.
My ambition has been to find this moth free, in order to discover, if possible, whether or no it ever makes its mysterious squeaking sound when at liberty. But I have not yet found it, and lepidopterists I have talked to on this subject, some of whom have spent their lives in districts where the insect is not uncommon, have assured me that they have never seen, and never expect to see, a death's-head which has not been artificially reared. Yet moths there must be, else there would be no caterpillars and no chrysalids.
Moths and butterflies
One evening, in a potato-patch, I witnessed a large hawk-moth meet his end in a way that greatly surprised me. I was watching and listening to the shrilling of a great green grasshopper, or leaf cricket, that delightful insect about which I shall have to write at some length in another chapter, when the big moth suddenly appeared at a distance of a dozen yards from where I stood. It was about the size of a privet-moth, and had not been many moments suspended before a spray of flowers, when a meadow-pipit, which had come there probably to roost, dashed at and struck it down, and then on the ground began a curious struggle. The great moth, looking more than half as big as the aggressor, beat the pipit with his strong wings in his efforts to free himself; but the other had clutched the soft, stout body in its claws, and standing over it with wings half open and head feathers raised, struck repeatedly at it with the greatest fury until it was killed. Then, in the same savage hawk-like manner, the dead thing was torn up, the pipit swallowing pieces so much too large for it that it had the greatest trouble to get them down. The gentle, timid, little bird had for the moment put on the "rage of the vulture."
In the southern half of the New Forest, that part of the country where insects of all kinds most abound, the moths and butterflies are relatively less important as a feature of the place, and as things of beauty, than some other kinds. The purple emperor is very rarely seen, but the silver-washed fritillary, a handsome, conspicuous insect, is quite common, and when several of these butterflies are seen at one spot playing about the bracken in some open sunlit space in the oak woods, opening their orange-red spotty wings on the broad, vivid green fronds, they produce a strikingly beautiful effect. It is like a mosaic of minute green tesseræ adorned with red and black butterfly shapes, irregularly placed.
But here the most charming butterfly to my mind is the white admiral, when they are seen in numbers, as in the abundant season of 1901, when the oak woods were full of them. Here is a species which, seen in a collection, is of no more value æsthetically than a dead leaf or a frayed feather dropped in the poultry-yard, or an old postage stamp in an album, without a touch of brilliance on its dull blackish-brown and white wings; yet which alive pleases the eye more than the splendid and larger kinds solely because of its peculiarly graceful flight. It never flutters, and as it sweeps airily hither and thither, now high as the tree-tops, now close to the earth in the sunny glades and open brambly places in the oak woods, with an occasional stroke of the swift-gliding wings, it gives you the idea of a smaller, swifter, more graceful swallow, and sometimes of a curiously-marked, pretty dragon-fly.
Dragon-flies