Hampshire Days

by W. H. Hudson

I agree with Beddoes, but his pretty description of our insect is not quite accurate, as I saw this evening, when, after copious rain, the sky cleared and a full moon shone on a wet, dusky-green earth. The light of the suspended glow-worm was of an exquisite golden green, and, side by side with it, the moonlight on the wet surface of a polished leaf was shining silver-white.

The light varies greatly in power, according, I suppose, to the degree of excitement of the insect and to the atmospheric conditions. Occasionally you will discover a light at a distance shining with a strange glory, a light which might be mistaken for a will-o'-the-wisp, and on a close view you will probably find that a male is on the scene, and the female, aware of his presence though he may be at some distance from her, invisible in the darkness, has been wrought up to the highest state of excitement. You will find her clinging to a stem or leaf, her luminous part raised, and her whole body swaying in a measured way from side to side. If the insect happens to be a foot or two above the ground, in a tangle of bramble and bracken, with other plants with slender stems and deep-cut leaves, the appearance is singularly beautiful. The light looks as if enclosed within an invisible globe, which may be as much as fifteen inches in diameter, and within its circle the minutest details of the scene are clear to the vision, even to the finest veining of the leaves, the leaves shining a pure translucent green, while outside the mystic globe of light all is in deep shadow and in blackness.

The glow-worm's light

With regard to the attitude of the glow-worm when displaying its light, we see how ignorant of the living creature the illustrators of natural history books have been. In scores of works on our shelves, dating from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the glow-worm is depicted giving out its light while crawling on the ground, and in many illustrations the male is introduced, and is shown flying down to its mate. They drew their figures not from life, but from specimens in a cabinet, only leaving out the pins. But the glow-worm is not perhaps a very well-known creature. A lady in Hampshire recently asked me if it was a species of mole that came out of its run to exhibit its light in the darkness. The insect invariably climbs up, and suspends itself by clinging to, a stem or blade or leaf, and the hinder part of the body curls up until its under surface, the luminous part, is uppermost, thus making the light visible from the air above. In thick hedges I often find the light four or even five feet above the ground. Occasionally a glow-worm will shine from a flat surface, usually a big leaf on to which it has crawled when climbing. Resting horizontally on the leaf, it curls its abdomen up and over its body after the manner of the earwig, until the light is in the right position.

When we consider these facts—the way in which the body is curved and twisted about in order (as it seems) to exhibit the light to an insect flying through the air above, and the increase in the light when the sexual excitement is at its greatest—the conclusion seems unavoidable that the light has an important use, namely, to attract the male. Unavoidable, I say, and yet I am not wholly convinced. The fire-flies of diurnal habits may be seen flying about, feeding and pairing, by day; yet when evening comes they fly abroad again, exhibiting their light. What the function of the light is, or of what advantage it is to the insect, we do not know. Again, it has seemed to me that the male of the glow-worm, even when attracted to the female, fears the light. Thus, when the excitement of the shining glow-worm has caused me to look for the male, I have found him, not indeed in but outside of the circle of light, keeping close to its borders, moving about on feet and wings in the dark herbage and on the ground. I know very well that not a few observations made by one person, but many—hundreds if possible—by different observers, are needed before we can say positively that the male glow-worm fears or is repelled by the light. But some of my observations make me think that the male of the glow-worm, like the males of many other species in different orders that fly by night, is drawn to the female by the scent, and that the light is a hindrance instead of a help, although in the end he is drawn into it. We always find it exceedingly hard to believe that anything in nature is without a use; but we need not go very far—not farther than our own bodies, to say nothing of our minds—before we are compelled to believe that it is so. We may yet find that the beautiful light of our still companion of the dew is of no more use to it than the precious jewel in the toad's head is to the toad.

Hornets

The hornet, one of my first favourites, has, to our minds, nothing mysterious like our glow-worm, and nothing serpentine or supernatural about him, but he is a nobler, more powerful and splendid creature than any dragon-fly. I care not to look at a vulgar wasp nor at any diurnal insect, however fine, when he is by, or his loud, formidable buzzing hum is heard. As he comes out of the oak-tree shade and goes swinging by in his shining golden-red armature, he is like a being from some other hotter, richer land, thousands of miles away from our cold, white cliffs and grey seas. Speaking of that, our hornet, which is at the head of the family and genus of true wasps in Britain and Europe, is not only large and splendid for a northern insect, since he is not surpassed in lustre by any of his representatives in other parts of the globe.

I admire and greatly respect him, this last feeling dating back to my experience of wasps during my early life in South America. When a boy I was one summer day in the dining-room at home by myself, when in at the open door flew a grand wasp of a kind I had never seen before, in size and form like the hornet, but its colour was a uniform cornelian red without any yellow. Round the room it flew with a great noise, then dashed against a window-pane, and I, greatly excited and fearing it would be quickly gone if not quickly caught, flew to the window, and dashing out my hand, like the wonderfully clever parson-collector, I grasped it firmly by the back with finger and thumb. Now, I had been accustomed to seize wasps and bees of many kinds in this way without getting stung, but this stranger was not like other wasps, and quickly succeeded in curling his abdomen round, and planting his long sting in the sensitive tip of my forefinger. Never in all my experience of stings had I suffered such pain! I dropped my wasp like the hottest of coals, and saw him fling himself triumphantly out of the room, and never again beheld one of his kind. Even now when I stand and watch English hornets at work on their nests, coming and going, paying no attention to me, a memory of that hornet of a distant land returns to my mind; and it is like a twinge, and I venture on no liberties with Vespa crabro.

The hornet is certainly not an abundant insect, nor very generally distributed. One may spend years in some parts of the country and never see it. I was lately asked by friends in Kent, who have their lonely house in a wooded and perhaps the wildest spot in the county, if the hornet still existed in England, or really was an English insect, as they had not seen one in several years. Now in the woods I frequent in the Forest I see them every day, and the abundance of the hornet is indeed for me one of the attractions of the place. His nests are rarely found in old trees, but are common about habitations, in wood-piles, and old, little-used outhouses. I have heard farmers say in this place that they would not hurt a hornet, but regard it as a blessing. So it is, and so is every insect that helps to keep down the everlasting plague of cattle-worrying and crop-destroying flies and grubs and caterpillars.

But I am speaking of the hornet merely as an Insect Notable, a spot of brilliant colour in the scene, one of the shining beings that inhabit these green mansions. He is magnificent, and it is perhaps partly due to his vivid and lustrous red and gold colour, his noisy flight, and fierce hostile attitudes, and partly to the knowledge of his angry spirit and venomous sting, which makes him look twice as big as he really is.