Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/210

154 farmers' hen runs easier to loot, and the native fauna stupidly indifferent; rabbits had competed with stoats in the old country; these unsophisticated natives were simple game. Goats on St. Helena enjoyed the native forests, and wiped out countless creatures which these had formerly supported, and in oceanic islands everywhere the omnivorous rat has swept interesting insular forms away, leaving the zoologist irate but impotent.

What is so easy to see where vertebrates are the chief actors is not so evident amongst the lower forms of life, but the great changes, the struggles for the mastery, are just as keen, just as ruthless in result.

Indeed, the wholesale destruction is numerically much greater than amongst vertebrates, and not merely because the smaller try are more abundant. Year by year, if we observe and think, we witness a calamity, a massacre more ruthless than anything in vertebrate economy. What, for instance, happens to the house flies? They annoyed us thoroughly during the summer months; we wished them anywhere but where they were; then autumn came and all vanished. Here and there on wall or window-pane we found one stiff and dead, in attitude of life, but glued to its sarcophagus by the deadly fungus that ate its life away: but we only see a few, millions perish unnoticed. Just enough survive to carry on the race, to repeople the world with winged annoyance. And the aphides, the green fly, which clustered in uncountable crowds on our plants, sucking the life-blood of our cherished roses, our necessary vegetables, our forest trees; the stem mother produced millions of parthenogenetic offspring, generation after generation during the summer. Alarming calculations were issued to warn us what would happen if the garden were neglected; we syringe, we employ all kinds of restraints and preventive methods, but the aphides continue to multiply. Then