1412 



ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY BULLETIN 



A71 Industrious Elephant. — The Indian ele- 

 phant, Luna, has developed a collecting ten- 

 dency which greatly embarrasses her keepers. 

 She discovered several iron girders, each weigh- 

 ing about five hundred pounds, that our iron 

 workers had stored between two fences sur- 

 rounding the elephant yards. By strenuous 

 trunk work she managed to roll these under the 

 corral fence and drag them, one at a time, into 

 the building. It is a heroic task to bring even 

 one of these girders in the Elephant House, and 

 Luna has announced each event by raising the 

 girder and dropping it with a tremendous crash 

 upon the cement floor. We now will have the 

 really formidable task of carrying out the bars, 

 as Luna cannot be induced to reverse her order 

 of proceeding. 



A Guilty Basarish. — When Keeper George 

 Snyder found that five of his young mourning 

 doves had been killed in the night by dashing 

 about their cage, he was more than mildly an- 

 noyed. Further investigation showed that sev- 

 eral domestic pigeons inside the Pheasant Avi- 

 ary had been killed. It was evident that some 

 creature had been running about the cage-top, 

 with results only too well known to keepers of 

 game birds. The difficulties of rearing birds in 

 captivity are indeed manifold, but nothing is so 

 disturbing as the depredations of vermin. 



After some search, an aperture measuring- 

 two inches by three inches in a skylight shield 

 was found to be decorated with several incrim- 

 inating hairs. The evidence, however, was of 

 such doubtful nature, that we could not deter- 

 mine the depredator. The hairs were too long 

 for a rat, too pale for a raccoon, too curly for 

 an opossum — and anyway, the space in the wire 

 was much too small to admit either of the latter. 

 There was no time for quibbling in such an 

 emergency, and that night traps of many sorts 

 were set in promising jDlaces. The first trap 

 inspected the following morning, one of the box 

 type, held a snarling captive, quite unharmed. 

 But what manner of beast was this, with the 

 bushy, ringed tail of a raccoon, the sinuous body 

 of a marten, and the face and temper of a cat? 

 Gingerly picking up the trap-cage, the captor 

 carried it and its disgruntled inmate to the 

 Small Mammal House, where its advent was 

 hailed with joy. It proved to be a basarisk, or 

 ring-tailed "cat," a carnivorous member of the 

 raccoon family, whose habitat is Texas and Cen- 



tral America. The animal liad escaped from 

 its cage nearly three months before. The ex- 

 cellent condition of the culprit proved it to be 

 the perpetrator of many crimes that had been 

 attributed to comparatively innocent rats and 

 raccoons. — L. S. C. 



WASPS AT THE TROPICAL RESEARCH 

 STATION. 



By Paul G. Howes, Research Assistant. 

 Photographs by the author. 



SOLITARY wasps have always interested 

 me above all other insects. They show a 

 greater variation of habits and greater in- 

 dividuality. They possess more personality and 

 enthusiasm in their work than other members 

 of their order, and when I reached Guiana last 

 February, I decided to spend some time in un- 

 tangling some of the mysteries surrounding 

 their lives. 



Several years ago I made a trip across Co- 

 lumbia on the opposite side of South America. 

 I was constantly traveling, and had no time to 

 devote to insects, yet even under such unfavor- 

 able conditions, I was impressed by the richness 

 of a field that was as yet almost untouched by 

 scientists. 



When I settled down to work on the Maza- 

 runi River, I soon realized the vast abundance 

 of tropical Hymenoptera, and how really colos- 

 sal is our ignorance of the lives of these fas- 

 cinating insects. 



In the north, I have worked an entire season, 

 and at its close had only half a dozen life his- 

 tories partly completed. Here, at the Tropical 

 Station of the Zoological Society, in a little un- 

 der five months I have found over seventy spe- 

 cies nesting. These seventy odd wasps and bees 

 present a range of habits so intensely interest- 

 ing and varied that one might spend the greater 

 part of a life-time specializing upon them. They 

 range in size from tiny creatures three milli- 

 metres in length, building delicate little hang- 

 ing baskets that look like gossamer, to huge blue 

 and bronze insects that carry off spiders heavier 

 than themselves to their tunnels under ground, 

 for their young to feed upon. 



I find masons, workers in silk, potters, car- 

 penters, collectors of resin, paper-makers, min- 

 ers and many other types whose nests, often of 

 exquisite beauty, are constructed from a great 



