PLANTS AND ANIMALS IN WINTER. 499 



tliem in strange places and under many disguises, for they can 

 not migrate, as do the majority of the birds, nor can they live 

 an active life while the source of their food supply, the plants, 

 are inactive. 



The majority of those insects which next May or June will be 

 found feeding on the buds or leaves of our trees, or crawling 

 wormlike over the grass of our lawns, or burrowing beneath the 

 roots of our garden plants, are represented in the winter by the 

 eggs alone. These eggs are deposited in autumn by the mother 

 insect, on or near the object destined to furnish the young, or 

 larvae, their food. Each egg corresponds to a seed of one of our 

 annual plants, being, like it, but a form of life so fashioned and 

 fitted as to withstand for a long period intense cold; the mother 

 insect, like the summer form of the plant, succumbing to the first- 

 severe frost. 



Thus myriads of the eggs of grasshoppers are in the early 

 autumn deposited in the ground, in compact masses of forty to 

 sixty each. About mid-April they begin to hatch, and the 

 sprightly little insects, devoid of wings, but otherwise like their 

 parents, are seen on every hand. 



A comparatively small number of insects pass the winter in 

 the larval or active stage of the young. Of these, perhaps the 

 best known is the brown "woolly worm" or "hedgehog cater- 

 pillar," as it is familiarly called. It is thickly covered with stiff 

 black hairs on each end, and with reddish hairs on the middle of 

 the body. These hairs appear. to be evenly and closely shorn, so 

 as to give the animal a velvety look ; and as they have a certain 

 degree of elasticity, and the caterpillar curls up at the slightest 

 touch, it generally manages to slip away when taken into the 

 hand. Beneath loose bark, boards, rails, and stones, this cater- 

 pillar may be found in midwinter, coiled up and apparently life- 

 less. On the first bright, sunny days of spring it may be seen 

 crawling rapidly over the ground, seeking the earliest vegetation 

 which will furnish it a literal " breakfast." In April or May the 

 chrysalis, surrounded by a loose cocoon formed of the hairs of 

 the body interwoven with coarse silk, may be found in situations 

 similar to those in which the larva passed the winter. From this, 

 the perfect insect, the Isabella tiger moth, emerges about the last 

 of June. It is a medium-sized moth, dull orange in color, with 

 three rows of small black spots on the body, and some scattered 

 spots of the same color on the wings. 



By breaking open rotten logs one can find in midwinter the 

 grubs or larvae of many of the wood-boring beetles, and, beneath 

 logs and stones near the margins of ponds and brooks, hordes of 

 the maggots or larvae of certain kinds of flies may often be found 

 huddled together in great masses. The larvae of a few butterflies 



