Many butterflies, frail though they seem, do pass the New England winter successfully. The Antiopa vanessa, otherwise known as mourning-cloak or Camberwell beauty, a handsome brown fellow with blue spots and a pale-yellow margin, well known to every one, flits joyously through the woods with the very first warm days of spring. He has been snugged up in some dry crevice, numbed and torpid, but very much alive, all winter. The first genial warmth sets him free, and later I always find his children browsing on the willow twigs over in the cove. They are rough chaps, horrid with bristling black spines and with dull red spots relieving their otherwise plain black hides. But they grow fast, and by and by go out upon a twig and hang themselves, head down, by a little silken rope, swinging there in the wind, simply a dead caterpillar that has imitated Judas.
One day the caterpillar part sloughs off. It is a fairly sudden process. You may paddle by the willows in the morning and see all your little Judases hanging in a row. Paddle back at noon and their skins have shrivelled and slipped off, and you have chrysalids, queer, impish-looking things, swinging there still, head down. You know they are alive; indeed, if you poke them they will wiggle impatiently, but they swing in the wind and give no other sign for a week or ten days. Then they cast a second skin, and pop out full-grown butterflies that stretch their wings for a time leisurely, then suddenly dash into the air and go off over the hill like mad. The whole thing is so sudden! The change, when it does come, is as if some woodland magician had waved a willow wand and said “Abra-ca-dabra; presto, change!” Time and again I have watched to see that caterpillar skin fall off, and again to see the vanessa step forth from the domino in which it has been masquerading, but they have always been too quick for me.
Other butterflies survive in the chrysalis all winter and come forth full-grown and fit in the spring. Such may speak to your listening imagination through their beauty, which is often great, or through their resurrection from seeming death, though if you will observe them closely in the chrysalid form you will see that they are not even seemingly dead. Evangelists who have held up the butterfly to us as a prototype of that resurrection which we may expect if we are good, evidently never closely observed the chrysalis of a good healthy butterfly, else they had not been so sure of their corpse.
Lately I have had chrysalids of the Papilio asterias, the common eastern swallowtail, in my study. I found the fat black and yellow worms on my parsley and caged them. They soon hitched themselves to the wire netting by their tails, hanging from overhead on a slant, their shoulders (so to speak) being supported by a single loop of silk. If you did but tap on the wire netting or scratch it these chrysalids would wiggle and jerk quite angrily, their action saying plainly, “Can’t you let me alone? I’m just having a nap!” No; it is plainly no death and resurrection which makes a butterfly. It is merely a caterpillar who was dressed for the fancy ball all the time. He came to the woodland hall in his greatcoat. This he sheds for a domino, in which he masquerades for a time. Then he bursts forth for the final festivities in a robe of princely beauty.
My chrysalids did this only the other day. Wonderful creatures of black and yellow came forth, stretched their wings till I could see the dainty shading of blue and the peacock-feather eye of red and black on the lower part of the secondary wings; then, as I opened the window they dashed madly away as the vanessas do from willow twigs in the cove. The butterfly has been held up to us as an example of lazy dalliance. I have never watched one that was not as busy as a politician on election day. Especially do those just wakened from the chrysalis form rush away as if they knew all their work was before them and they longed to be at it.
Of them all the monarch is not the most beautiful, but I rank him as surely the ablest. His annual migration shows him to have wonderful strength of wing, and either much wisdom or an extraordinarily developed instinct. Very likely he has both. Further, through accident pure and simple, or else a spirit of adventure fostered by the joys of long annual journey, he is steadily extending his habitat to embrace the known world. Originally of North America only, he has within the last dozen years taken ship for Australia, where he has multiplied greatly in the warmer regions, and has wandered again over sea to Java, Sumatra, and followed the flag into the Philippines. He is well established at the Cape de Verde Islands, and is doing his best to be happy in the pale sunshine of the south of England, whence specimens are reported yearly.
THE RESTING TIME OF THE BIRDS
THE RESTING TIME OF THE BIRDS
THIS morning I heard the bluebirds again for the first time for weeks. They came up from the pasture to the apple trees and sang their modest little snatches of song in that shyly sweet, reserved yet fond, manner which makes the bluebird the best loved of all our pasture birds. There have been no bluebirds about my garden since the yegg raid of late May and its resulting tragedy. Now they are back, but there is in their call a note of sadness which indeed comes into the voice of every bluebird as autumn approaches, though I think it is accentuated in mine this year.
When I say yegg I mean English sparrow, and if I could think of a worse name, equally descriptive of him, I would give it. This is the story of the foul deed, only one of many, no doubt, perpetrated by this cowardly crew. In late March I put out in my garden three bird boxes such as bluebirds love to inhabit. These were immediately inspected by the neighborhood flock of English sparrows, just beginning to pair off, and finally decided upon as undesirable, perhaps because I had intentionally placed no perch before the door.