Hampshire Days

by W. H. Hudson

One of the most impressive sights in insect life is, strange to say, in the autumn, when cold rains and winds and early frosts have already brought to an end all that seemed best and brightest in that fairy world.

Insects on ivy blossoms

This is where an ancient or large ivy grows in some well-sheltered spot on a wall or church, or on large old trees in a wood, and flowers profusely, and when on a warm bright day in late September or in October all the insects which were not wholly dead revive for a season, and are drawn by the ivy's sweetness from all around to that one spot. There are the late butterflies, and wasps and bees of all kinds, and flies of all sizes and colours—green and steel-blue, and grey and black and mottled, in thousands and tens of thousands. They are massed on the clustered blossoms, struggling for a place; the air all about the ivy is swarming with them, flying hither and thither, and the humming sound they produce may be heard fifty yards away like a high wind. One cannot help a feeling of melancholy at this animated scene; but they are anything but melancholy. Their life has been a short and a merry one, and now that it is about to end for ever they will end it merrily, in feasting and revelry.

And never does the hornet look greater, the king and tyrant of its kind, than on these occasions. It swings down among them with a sound that may be heard loud and distinct above the universal hum, and settles on the flowers, but capriciously, staying but a moment or two in one place, then moving to another, the meaner insects all expeditiously making room for it. And after tasting a few flowers here and there it takes its departure. These large-sized October hornets are all females, wanderers from ruined homes, in search of sheltered places where, foodless and companionless, and in a semi-torpid condition, each may live through the four dreary months to come. In March the winter of their discontent will be over, and they will come forth with the primrose and sweet violet to be founders and mothers of new colonies—the brave and splendid hornets of another year; builders, fighters, and foragers in the green oak-woods; a strenuous, hungry and thirsty people, honey-drinkers, and devourers of the flesh of naked white grubs, and caterpillars, black and brown and green and gold, and barred and quaintly-coloured swift aerial flies.

CHAPTER VII

Great and greatest among insects—Our feeling for insect music—Crickets and grasshoppers—Cicada anglica—Locusta viridissima—Character of its music—Colony of green grasshoppers—Harewood Forest—Purple emperor—Grasshoppers' musical contests—The naturalist mocked—Female viridissima—Over-elaboration in the male—Habits of female—Wooing of the male by the female.

I had thought to include all or most of the greatest of the insects known in these parts in the last chapter, but the hornet, and the vision it called up of that last revel in the late-blossoming ivy on the eve of winter and cold death, seemed to bring that part of the book to an end. The hornet was the greatest in the sense that a strong man and conqueror is the greatest among ourselves, as the lion or wolf among mammals, and that feathered thunderbolt and scourge, the peregrine falcon, among birds. But there are great and greatest in other senses; and just as there are singers, big and little, as well as warriors among the "insect tribes of human kind," so there are among these smaller men of the mandibulate division of the class Insecta. And their singers, when not too loud and persistent, as they are apt to be in warmer lands than ours, are among the most agreeable of the inhabitants of the earth. They are less to us than to the people of the southern countries of Europe—infinitely less than they were to some of the civilised nations of antiquity, and than they are to the Japanese of to-day. This is, I suppose, on account of their rarity with us, for our best singers are certainly somewhat rare or else exceedingly local. The field-cricket, which must be passed over in this chapter to be described later on, is an instance in point. The universal house-cricket is known to, and in some degree loved by, all or most persons; it is the cricket on the hearth, that warm, bright, social spot when the world outside is dark and cheerless; the lively, companionable sound endears itself to the child, and later in life is dear because of its associations. The field-grasshopper, too, is familiar to everyone in the summer pastures; but the best of our insect musicians, the great green grasshopper, appears to be almost unknown to the people. Here, for instance, where I am writing, there is one on the table which stridulates each afternoon, and in the evening when the lamp is lighted. The sustained bright shrilling penetrates to all parts of the house, and in the tap-room of the inn, two rooms away, the villagers, coming in for their evening beer and conversation, are startled at the unfamiliar, sharp, silvery sound, and ask if it is a bird.

Insect music