THE REDISCOVERED COUNTRY 353 



bird at present, but my boyhood saw many of them; and 

 for once the bird was obliterated by his background, I 

 should say he was revealed at least fifty times. In other 

 words the imitation, while real, is poetic. The bluejay 

 against blue snow shadows is another case in point. The 

 resemblance and the blending are there, but one has only 

 to reflect that, even in winter, for once the jay is to be looked 

 for against snow, a hundred times he is silhouetted in trees 

 against the sky. That leaves out of account the fact that 

 bluejays live right on through the summer. Why, in the 

 name of conunon sense, if a bluejay or a wood duck were to 

 be ''concealingly coloured," should the rare fortuitous 

 background be chosen for imitation rather than the daily 

 environment? The battleground for opinion is here enor- 

 mous. I have no intention of entering it, and cite the wood 

 duck and the bluejay merely as examples. 



Carried into the world of the larger animals the poetic 

 resemblances, while not less numerous, become more fanci- 

 ful. One of the most plausible examples is the mottling of 

 the leopard to imitate sim spots in the forest. I am far 

 from saying that this effect does not help in concealment. 

 But from what little I have seen of the leopard (a) he is 

 more likely to be found in dense shade than in spotted 

 shadow; (b) he hunts at night when there is remarkably 

 little sunlight; (c) he has no "natural enemies" from which 

 he could wish to conceal himself.* If this is true of so 

 strikingly poetic a resemblance as "spots" for light and 

 shadow, how much more true is it of more fanciful re- 

 semblances. The larger animals move about so constantly, 



* Prehistoric man had little use for a leopard outside a trap! 



