148 MR. C. X. BARKER 



flowers of the Poinsettia, a shrub non-indigenous to S. 

 Africa, is nevertheless extraordinarily attractive to many 

 of our butterflies, bees, wasps and other insects, folaus 

 silas and /. sidus, under ordinary conditions wary in- 

 sects^ when feeding on this flower, can be taken with the 

 utmost ease. The i^ure Avhite undersides of these butter- 

 flies, contrasted with the bright red bracts of the Poin- 

 settia, make them extremely conspicuous, yet these and 

 other butterflies appear to be quite oblivious of danger. 

 Of all the records given in ^'Bionomics of S. African In- 

 sects " the most important in favour of systematic perse- 

 cution is that afl'orded by the numerous butterfly wings 

 found in the nests of the Falconets MicroJiierax caeru- 

 lescens, L., and M. jyingillarius, Drap., as recorded by 

 Colonel Bingham, page 303, but taken as a whole the re- 

 cords afi'ord, to my mind, very meagre evidence on which 

 to claim that butterflies have been driven to adopt super- 

 ficial disgniises and other qualifications against the at- 

 tacks of birds, which arc of little or no use in protecting 

 them against their many other and far more numerous 

 persecutors. In the whole of my 30 odd years of field 

 work, I have never seen a butterflA^^ captured by a bird, 

 but I do remember on one occasion seeing a Paradise fly- 

 catcher, Terpsiphone po spicillata, swoop at a red butter- 

 fly, either Danaida crysippus or Hypolimnas misippus 

 (female), which the butterfly easily evaded. It struck me 

 at the time that the action of the bird Avas more sportive 

 than in real earnest. Colonel Yerbury mentions the occur- 

 rence, referred to above, of the Cingalese Ashy shrike 

 hawking Crastia core and carrying its captures up into 

 a tree, where he (Colonel Yerbury) was unable to see 

 Avhethei- they were eaten. Our Natal black and white 

 Fiscal Shrike, Laniits roUaiis, often seizes the common 

 and reputed very distasteful Cantharid, Mjjlahris alter- 

 nans, Cast., which it impales alive on thoras, apparently 

 out of pure sport, as the remains are met with in all 

 stages of decomposition. Possibly the capture of 

 Crastia core by the Ashy Shrike is an analoGfous occur- 



