6 



THE COLLECTORS' MONTHLY. 



supposed to be a call-note to its mate, 

 for the female will invariably appear, 

 and then the couple will fly away to- 

 gether. 



The destructiveness of beetles may 

 be imagined when some of their grubs 

 are as large as a man's finger, and live 

 in the trunk of a tree from ten to 

 twenty years before changing their 

 shape and becoming beetles. All these 

 years they are constantly feeding. 

 They go boring through the trees like 

 augers, and leave trails as crooked and 

 devious as the path of a ship in a head 

 wind. Grubs have been known to 

 bore over fifty feet in oak trees before 

 they were turned into beetles. 



One might suppose when a grub is 

 encased in two inches of hard green 

 maple, that he is pretty well protected 

 from the outside world ; but it is not 

 so, for we have a fly, called the Ich- 

 neumon Fly — the wings are transpar- 

 ent, the legs and attennse yellow, the 

 waist wasp-like and a tail like a horse- 

 hair, about five inches long. Through 

 this fine hair she deposits her eggs. 



It has been a great mystery to know 

 how this fly can tell the exact spot in 

 the tree to find a grub. She no doubt 

 does it by listening ; for a man placing 

 his ear to a tree can hear the grub 

 boring. Having located the grub the 

 next thing is to get at him. On the 

 end of her horse-hair tail is a two- 

 bladed back saw ; with this saw the 

 fly cuts through the solid wood to the 

 grub. But when she reaches him she 

 does not destroy him, she simply de- 

 posits an egg on his back ; the ego; 



hatches another grub, and the second 

 one bores into the first, feeds on him, 

 destroying him, and enlarges, until in 

 time, after vairous changes, it emerges 

 from the tree another Ichneumon fly. 

 It cannot propagate its species without 

 finding this grub. 



♦+♦ 



Colaptes. (Continued). 



about six inches. The horney tip is 

 three-eights of an inch long, with one- 

 third of the extreme tip lined on each 

 side with very fine hair like spines ; 

 the remaining two-thirds of the tip to 

 fleshy part of tongue, flat and smooth > 

 the whole tip arrow-head shaped and 

 slightly notched near the end. The 

 first specimen examined, the spines on 

 extreme tip was wanting ; hence they 

 must have been worn or scraped off in 

 some manner., As the Colaptes Aur- 

 atus, U. L. No. 412 is the best known 

 bird in our district, 1 will now only 

 describe those parts unlike those of 

 the other species, and necessary for 

 comparison. It has a scarlet crescent 

 on the nape, black maler stripe ; 

 Shafts of primaries and tail feathers a 

 bright yellow, while the under surface 

 of wings and tail is a rich golden hue 

 or " gamboge yellow." The Colaptes 

 Cqfer, U. L. No. 413, {Mexicanus), 

 has no scarlet crescent on the nape, 

 but has the maler stripe scarlet instead 

 of black. Shafts of the primaries and 

 tail feathers, also the under surface of 

 the wings and tail, have a reddish tinge, 

 or, as expressed by a well known au- 

 thor : — " The rnbef action replaces the 

 an ration of the Auratus" 



