286 The Field Naturalisfs Quarterly Nov. 



and hide among the grass when frightened. For these 

 you will have to search ; while others, with premonitory 

 quivering of the wings, dart off to the adjacent gloom. 

 Sometimes the night -jars swoop along and snatch the 

 moths from off the trunk beneath your very nose, which 

 is unkind, especially when they choose a rare one ; at 

 others, toads squat beneath the sugared patch and glut 

 themselves upon the drunken moths ; while slugs and ear- 

 wigs, centipedes and long-horned grasshoppers, also show 

 a predilection for strong liquors. 



The autumn, too, is the best time of year to dig with 

 a trowel at the base of large trees for moths' chrysalids ; 

 and it will be found that the north-east face is the most 

 prolilic, because the caterpillar walks down the trunk to 

 pupate during a warm day towards the end of summer, 

 probably with a wind — which he, in common with all 

 insects, seeks to avoid — from the south-west ; and also 

 because thence, too, come most of the drenching winter 

 rains, which, permeating the soil, might cause his death 

 by mould. All the large indigenous trees are productive; 

 but great numbers of pupse are usually overlooked un- 

 wittingly, through their exact resemblance to a lump of 

 earth, and it has been asserted that the experienced 

 digger effects more captures by his sense of touching the 

 creatures with his fingers than actually seeing them with 

 his eyes. It is well to begin pupa-digging early to an- 

 ticipate that arch-entomologist, the mole, who devours our 

 quarry with such avidity and circumspection that one of his 

 runs at the base of a tree is good and sufficient reason 

 for passing on at once to the next. 



However good the collecting season has been, there is 

 always a longing to see what is still on the move even up 

 to the time that the Winter Moth and Winter Gnat alone 

 people the bare and gaunt hedgerows. The last straggling 

 heads of the Angelica will be inspected with more care in 

 October than, in their abundance, they received in August ; 

 the late knapweed, ragwort, and yarrow, overlooked alike by 

 the insects and ourselves in more fragrant days ; the dank 

 rushes in woody places ; the thicker branches of the Coniferas 

 and the thickset heather on the uplands, all may still be 



