Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/221

Rh back to a tiny midge, flit, dart, or hover. From each wing comes some sound, some vibration, perceptible or imperceptible, which in the aggregate makes the busy, joyful hum of the wood. What does it all mean? The enjoyment of summer? The joy of living?

Look at the scene from another standpoint; look closely and critically, and watch the varying actors in this great life drama. Is it comedy or tragedy? The big leaves are stained, ragged, and torn; aphis, coccid, and fungus have blotched or scored them; leaf-miners have left their subcutaneous tracks in their tissues; larvæ have riddled and devoured their living flesh, drained their life blood. There are defoliated twigs on the oak, and a pretty little green-winged moth on the trunk; it and the mottled umber know what has become of those leaves; tortrix and geometer caterpillars were nourished upon them. A passing chaffinch sees the moth; one snap and it is gone. Everywhere is evidence of the larval insatiability of moth, beetle, sawfly, and dipteron, and everywhere ichneumons and other predaceous insects have attacked the caterpillars. Fungi push their brown or lurid red caps through the rotting leaf-mould, flourishing on decay; spongy fungus galls knob the half-submerged roots of the alder; fungi spot the decaying broken twigs and branches. One huge limb of the old white willow is down, and decomposition is destroying good timber; the wood-louse and centipede use its bellowing carcase for a shelter. An ancient oak is struggling for breath in the strangle-hold of the ivy; woody nightshade, honeysuckle, and other climbers trail over and smother any bush or shrub in their way. For yards the young reeds are already bruised and broken, for the weight of hundreds of roosting starlings has exceeded their power of endurance.

A rabbit screams, or the hunger cry of some young birpbird [sic] turns to a shrill note of terror and ends in a gasping sob;