Woodland Paths

by Winthrop Packard

The Samia cecropia is another of our silk-worm moths whose cocoon is not difficult to find. The cecropia, instead of rolling up in a pendant leaf, constructs his cocoon without protection, and glues it right side up beneath a stout twig or even a considerable limb. I have one now that I took from the under side of a big leaning alder bole, skiving it off with the bark, but most of those I have collected have been attached to slender twigs of low shrubs.

But, though the cecropia does not roll up in a leaf, he is apt to place his winter home where dead leaves will persist about him. I have never found him so plentiful as the promethea, though he is commonly reported as numerous. Perhaps this habit of hiding among the dead leaves has to do with this. He is our largest moth, and in beauty of coloring is surpassed, to my mind, only by two others.

One of these is Telia polyphemus,—a wonderful creature, almost as large as the cecropia, all a soft, rosy tan with fleckings of gray and white and bands of soft violet-gray and pink, and great eyespots of white margined with yellow, browed with peacock blue, and ringed with violet-black. The larva, which is bigger than a big man’s thumb, is a beautiful shade of transparent green with side slashings of silvery white, and feeds on most of our deciduous forest trees.

I have had most luck in finding them on chestnuts. Last fall, when beating a chestnut tree for the nuts, I dislodged several, one of which I brought home and put in a cage with some leaves. He refused to eat, but in a day or so spun a cocoon down in the corner of the box with a chestnut leaf glued over him. No wonder we rarely see either moth, caterpillar, or cocoon. The larva dwells in the higher trees, rolls himself in leaves in the autumn, and spends the winter on the ground, usually covered out of sight by the other leaves. Then the moth, wary and swift, flies only by night.

The Actias luna, the beautiful, long-tailed, green luna moth, is, I think, better known, for it has a way of flitting about woodland glades in late June or July, before nightfall. But in the caterpillar or the cocoon it is as hard to find as the polyphemus, and for similar reasons. It, too, feeds upon walnut and hickory, and in the fall spins a papery cocoon among the dried leaves on the ground.

The luna moth is to me the highest type of moth beauty, and it is worth a long search among leaves to find a cocoon of either this or the polyphemus, and have the splendid privilege of seeing the lovely inmate later emerge, spread its fairy-like wings, and soar away into the soft spring twilight. It is as great a wonder as it would be to step some mid-summer midnight into a fairy ring and, after having speech with Mab and Titania and Puck and Ariel, see them flit daintily across the face of the rising moon and vanish in the purple dusk. The world of the polyphemus and the luna, the cecropia and the promethea, is as far removed from ours and as full of strange romance as that.

Along the pond shore these mad March days one gets glimpses of another world, too, that is, I dare say, as regardless of us as we are of that of the moths. This morning in the dusk of young dawn the pond was like a black mirror reflecting the shadows of the sky. But across it, near the middle, was drawn a silver streak, the path of ducks swimming. Presently I heard their voices,—the resonant quack of a black duck and the hoarse “pra-a-p pr-a-a-p” of the drake. As they called, into the pond with a splash came a small flock of divers, showing white as they whirled to settle. The two species swam together, seemed to look each other over, held who knows what conversations in their own way, then separated. It is not for black duck and buffleheads to congregate, especially in the spring; and while the black duck and drake swam sedately away, the buffleheads began to hunt the small white perch which swim in schools near the surface, making a splash as if a stone was thrown into the water at every lightning-like dive.

Just as many a man here in Massachusetts lives his life and dies without ever having seen or heard of a polyphemus moth or a bufflehead, though both may fly over his own head on many a dusky twilight, so the migrating thousands of ducks each year fly over our cities and know little of their uproar and bustle, nothing of their yearnings toward art or theology, or of the inspiration of poets or the agony of the down-trodden. Their world is all-important to them; ours is nothing, so they escape our guns, which they vaguely feel will harm them.

Even we with our books, our laboratories, and our concerted research into all things under heaven and in earth, do not get very far into the lives of other creatures. I have said all the moths are still in their cocoons. Perhaps they are, all but one, at least. That is a small brown fellow that came flying across the brook in the chill air of a sunset a night or two ago and now lies dead on my desk.

I caught him, for I wanted to know what moth dared come forth when the ground was still frozen and no bud had yet burst. But I would better have let him fly along to work out his own destiny, for in all the moth-book there is no mention of this wee brown creature that dared the frosty night with frail wings. I do not think he was an uncommon specimen. Moths are so numerous that only the most characteristic varieties of the more important species can be noticed in the text-books.