MARVELS OF METAMORPHOSIS 



811 



Their guesses have 

 run all the way from 

 prospecting for gold to 

 hunting buried treas- 

 ure. I remember one 

 bright young lady 

 who asked if we were 

 collecting "botanical 

 specimens" — on a hill 

 where the ground was 

 burned bare, save for 

 a blanket of dry 

 ashes! But the lady 

 who called the police 

 topped them all. 



I was digging busily 



when I heard Danny's 



excited stage whisper: 



"Daddy, look! 



Radio cops!" 



Sure enough. A pa- 

 trol car had stopped 

 on the road below and 

 an officer was climb- 

 ing the slope. As he 

 approached and sized 

 us up, he began to 

 grin, but he seemed 

 to be puzzled, too. 



It appeared that his 

 curiosity was partly 

 official and partly per- 

 sonal. I told him that 

 we were prospecting 

 for parasites in the 

 nests of trapdoor spi- 

 ders. He grinned and 

 explained that some 

 good lady had phoned 

 in and demanded that 

 Danny and I be in- 

 vestigated as ''suspi- 

 cious characters"! I 

 knew that our clothes 

 had seen better da3's, 

 that we looked like criminals. 



"Aw, she was just burning up with curios- 

 ity," he said disgustedly. "And she took 

 that way to find out what you were doing." 



HELPFUL HUNCHES 



If I have been unusually fortunate in 

 finding valuable clues and rare specimens 

 along the way, it is only fair to give credit 

 to helpful hunches. 



For instance, there was the first day's 

 trapdoor spider hunting in the fall of 1935. 

 Male trapdoor spiders are rare. Naturalists 



jj^^gSadi 



THE AUTHOR OPENS "THE CASE OF THE CURIOUS COCOON 



"Special Invi'stiKator" Jcnks pursued clues for two years before finally 

 forcing the little-known hunting wasp to "confess" her crime in action 

 (pages S12-S19). Here he holds a trapdoor spider's tube cut open after 

 the insect invader fled. Carefully he lifts the lid of the wasp's skillfully 

 wrought cocoon, found within the slain spider's dwelling. 



but I wasn't aware 



have searched for years without finding a 

 specimen. The curious two-story cocoons 

 of the wasp that preys upon this spider are 

 also rather rare. And yet I left home that 

 day without any definite plans, followed my 

 hunches along new roads, stopped at a 

 place I had never seen before, and found 

 three males and three cocoons the very first 

 day! Besides, I found proof of the exist- 

 ence of still another mysterious enemy of 

 the trapdoor spider. 



The first days discoveries opened up 

 three possible lines of investigation. I 

 quickly decided against making a special 



