3 o8 AUTUMN AND WINTER 



commonest small bat may often be seen hawking for insects 

 on mild winter days, especially towards sunset ; but it does 

 not stay out long after dark. The supply of insects is then 

 too scanty for it ; and yet there are moths abroad on mild 

 nights all through the winter. It is remarkable that some of 

 the frailest and feeblest of all our British moths are hatched 

 in the nights of November, January, and February. They 

 belong to the light-winged and thin-bodied group of 

 geometers, and include the winter moth, a well-known 

 orchard pest. The male winter moth is winged, though a 

 feeble flyer ; but the wings of the female are so stunted as to 

 be useless for flight, and the moth on emerging from the 

 pupa in the earth, creeps up the stem of the fruit-tree on 

 which she was bred, lays her eggs there, and dies. This 

 inability of the female to wander is doubtless the safeguard 

 of the species, and enables it to survive the storms and rain 

 of the unkindly season when the moths emerge. From peril 

 of frost they are protected automatically, since cold retards 

 their emergence, and keeps them sealed in the pupa until a 

 mild spell of weather arrives. Besides the winter moth, 

 specially so called, this group of moths which appear in 

 winter and have wingless females includes several other 

 species, which appear between October and March. They 

 seem the most helpless of nature's sacrifices to winter's rage, 

 as we see the male's filmy wings outspread on the small 

 roadside puddle where it was dashed and drowned, or 

 sticking to the side of a newly tarred telegraph post. Yet 

 none of the stronger forms of life abroad in the winter nights 

 give so vivid a promise of spring as these little grey moths. 

 They bring visibly before our eyes the tender life hidden 

 deep in the bosom of nature through the winter, and show 

 that the time is coming when a multitude of brightly coloured 

 wings will shimmer in the soft spring nights. 



