”…What would the world be like without the fowls of the air? A desolate and very possibly uninhabitable wilderness; for we should have hardly a leaf upon our trees, a flower in our fields, or a railway train running at certain seasons of the year; and every time we clapped our hands we should feel a distinct layer of winged insects between them. I have seen huge oak trees in England denuded of their leaves by small caterpillars that were hanging by their fine silken threads from every bough, branch, and twig. In America, some years ago, a mighty host of caterpillars bade defiance for days together to a railway train by crossing the line upon which it was advancing in such prodigious numbers that their crushed bodies made the metals too greasy for the engine wheels to grip them, and after the contents of the sand-boxes had given out they simply slipped round and round without making any progress.
In most countries the stock topic of conversation amongst acquaintances is the weather, but in South America, instead of remarking, “It’s a fine morning!” they salute each other with some reference to insect life, such as, “How are you with regard to mosquitoes? ” Humboldt, the great traveller, records the fact that his boatmen got so used to slapping each other’s bare backs, in order to drive away the mosquitoes, that the poor fellows used to keep on slapping even whilst they were asleep. I have myself seen gnats rise in such clouds from tree tops on a sultry summer’s evening that they looked like pillars of smoke, and I once witnessed a number of hay harvesters absolutely driven from a field by midgets. Not long ago, I was compelled to abandon a small row-boat, which I was dragging through some deep heather growing on a piece of land dividing two Highland lochs, because of the torturing agony caused by the attacks of myriads of the same kind of hungry insects. At each footfall they rose in savage clouds, assailing every exposed part of my head and hands, even finding their way into my nostrils and ears, and making me sneeze and shiver in abject misery. It may come as news to some people that workmen, while building houses in the British Isles, have been known to wear veils to protect them from midgets…
…The people of France once made the experiment of doing without birds, but suffered so disastrously in consequence that the wise men of the country, after taking a lot of evidence on the subject, gave their verdict that “birds can live without man, but that man cannot live without birds.”…
…My little daughters and I turn our garden into a birds’ restaurant every winter. We save all our sunflower heads in the autumn, and directly the snowflakes commence to fly we take one or two out and tie them to upright sticks fastened to the palings or stuck in the ground, and the Greenfinches are not long in paying us a visit…”
Contributed by
Juan Pablo Macías