146 



THE YOUNG NATURALIST. 



[August 



by this time too we are at the confines of the wood. It is all of firs, 

 silent and sombre for the fir stems are only red where the sunlight 

 catches them and in the recesses of the wood are of an inky hue. On 

 them however we soon catch right of a red spot which turns out to be 

 Coccinula oblo 11 go guttata. This insect is rather common, crawling on 

 the trunks or hidden in chinks of the bark, with them are a few C. 

 ocellata. At first sight one asks oneself how it is that these beetles 

 have not acquired a more protective coloration, the answer probably 

 lies in the acrid juice which thev exude and which makes them a very 

 unpleasant mouthful to any climbing tit or tree creeper who may be in- 

 duced to try them, hence their very obtrusiveness becomes a protection 

 to them and we may perhaps account in the same way for the pro- 

 nounced or brilliant tints of all the Coccinellidce. 



These lady-birds seem, if we except a few more L. spinibarbis and 

 a Carabus catemdatus which we find under a fallen trunk to be almost 

 the only coleopterous denizens of this wood. Life of all kinds is sub- 

 dued and noiseless among these gloomy pines. Now and then if we 

 linger under a tree, a wood pigeon will break away with sudden clap 

 of wings, from her nest in the thick branches, and we can catch a faint 

 intermittent twitter of cole tits and gold crests high up in the tree 

 tops, but there is none of the hum and stir of life that penetrates the 

 oak woods and we are almost relieved to catch a glimpse of sky behind 

 the dark stems showing where the wood ends, there the ground breaks 

 away with gorse and heather and scattered ash trees down to a lane 

 which leads steeply to the shore. The great flats of the estuary shim- 

 mer in the light as the afternoon sun catches their wet sands half way 

 across, and if we could pierce the encircling veil of haze we should 

 descry beyond them the frontier hills of Wales. 



That country is divided from ours by a fence which runs through 

 the marsh. On these flats over which only the high spring tides ever 

 wash, are flocks of sheep innumerable, and in June as far as one can 

 see the whole plain is pink with the blossom of the sea thrift. 



Where the upper land curves down in long potatoe fields to the 

 level marsh is a strip of grassy turf with scattered stones. These we 

 carefully invert and find Harpalns proteus innumerable and of every 

 shade from purple to green, also Dichirotrichus pubescens, an insect so 

 variable in its coloration that however well known, it now and then 

 deceives one into taking it for something else unfamiliar and perhaps 

 rare. The Dichirotrichus haunts those stones which are well down in 



