The Adventures of a Grain of Dust Part 15

Comstock's "Pet Book" also tells about the prairie-dog; and Seton, in his "Wild Animals I Have Known," tells about "The Prairie Dog and His Kin."

It's a very common superst.i.tion among English country folk that shrews always drop dead if they attempt to cross a road. How do you suppose such a strange idea ever got started? Allen, in his "Nature's Work Shop," reasons it out, and his reasons seem very plausible. It's a fact that their dead bodies are nearly always found in roadways. You'll also find some interesting information about shrews in Johonnott's "Curious Flyers, Creepers and Swimmers"

and Wright's "Four-Footed Americans."

There's some little dispute about squirrels as tree-planters; that is to say as to just how they do it, for there's no question that they _do_ plant oaks and other trees. Th.o.r.eau, in his "Walden,"

gives the squirrel credit for doing an immense amount of tree-planting, but Ernest Ingersoll, in his article on squirrels in "Wild Neighbors," thinks the squirrel leaves comparatively few acorns or hickory-nuts, and that he doesn't forget where he puts them, as other writers on nature say. "They seem to know precisely the spot," says Mr. Ingersoll, "where each nut is buried, and go directly to it; and I have seen them hundreds of times when the snow was more than a foot deep, wade floundering through it straight to a certain point, dive down, perhaps far out of sight, and in a moment emerge with a nut in their jaws."

But _how_ the squirrel knows it's there--that's the mystery! Read what Ingersoll says about it. The whole essay is extremely good reading, and will tell you a number of things to watch out for in squirrels that you perhaps never have noticed.

In Pliny's "Natural History" you will find, among other quaint stories, one to the effect that mountain marmots put away hay in the fall by one animal using itself as a hay-rack--lying on his back with his load clasped close while he is pulled home by the tail. "Animal Arts and Crafts" tells what a simple little thing originated this idea. Many of the peasants of the Alps still believe it.

Hornaday, in his "Two Years in the Jungle," gives an interesting account of how one of the four-footed knights in armor--the pangolin--does himself up in a ball, and how next to impossible it is to "unlock" him.

Ingersoll, in discussing the various uses of tails in "Wild Neighbors," tells how a gerboa kangaroo brings home gra.s.s for his nest, done up in a sheaf of which his own little tail is the binder.

An interesting four-footed burrower, when he can't rob a prairie-dog of his hole--or some other body smaller than himself--is the coyote. There is a long talk on the coyote and his ways in "Wild Neighbors." This little book also gives pictures of the different kinds of shrews in the United States, and a lot of detail about them and their little paws and their noses and their tails.

It's a queer thing how systematic and prompt shrews and moles are in business. You can actually set your watch by them, as you will see in the same book.

In the article on the gopher in the "Americana" you will find how the gopher got his name. Can you guess, when I tell you it's from a French word meaning "honeycomb"?

CHAPTER VIII

(AUGUST)

'Till he came unto a streamlet In the middle of the forest To a streamlet still and tranquil That had overflowed its margin, To a dam made by the beavers, To a pond of quiet water, Where knee-deep the trees were standing, Where the water-lilies floated, Where the rushes waved and whispered.

--_Longfellow: "Hiawatha."_

WATER FARMERS WHO HELP MAKE LAND

As we all spend more or less time in the water in August I thought it would be a good idea to take as the subject of this chapter the lives of the water farmers. Some of these--the crayfish and the turtle, for example--you know well, and everybody has heard of the beaver family, but they will all bear closer acquaintance. I know, for I've spent a good deal of time among them.

I. THE TURTLE PEOPLE

Every boy who has tramped along creeks and ponds knows the mud-turtle.

We ought to call him a tortoise, perhaps, but the name turtle is more common. I don't know why; perhaps because it's a little easier to say.

Strictly speaking, the name "turtle" is applied to the members of the family that have flippers, and spend nearly all their time in the water; while the tortoises are the ones that have feet and put in much of their time on land. (And then, of course, there are the tortoises of fables that run races with hares, and so teach us not to be too confident of ourselves because we think we are cleverer than some other people.)

[Ill.u.s.tration: A HAWKSBILL TURTLE]

The common box-turtle of the United States you'll meet in the woods in the evening and early morning, wandering about looking for something to eat. He spends practically all his time on land in Summer; and in the Winter, all his time in bed. As soon as cold weather comes on he digs a hole in the ground, or scoops out a place under some brush, and turns in.

But the box-turtle--he's really a tortoise--is what some of his relatives would call a "landlubber," no doubt, for many of the tortoises who live in the sea rarely leave it; as if they had half a mind to go back and be only flipper people, as the ancestors of both the turtles and the tortoises must have been; since all life is supposed to have begun in the sea.

All the tortoises of temperate regions dig in for the Winter, but one Southern member of the family makes his home in a dugout throughout the year. He's called the "gopher" turtle. The gopher turtles are natives of Florida, and live in pairs in burrows. Other members of the turtle tribe do not pair, but there's one time in their lives when both land and water turtles dig into the soil and that's when they are laying their eggs. The females scoop out hollows with their hind legs, kicking up the dirt, first with one leg and then with the other. But they're as careful of the dirt they dig out as a beaver is when he digs a ca.n.a.l. They sc.r.a.pe it up in a little ridge all around the hole.

What for? Just watch.

HOW MOTHER TURTLE "TAMPS" HER NEST

As soon as she has finished laying her eggs, Mother Turtle carefully sc.r.a.pes this dirt back over them and tamps it down, much as a foundryman tamps the sand in a mould. You can guess what she uses for a tamper--the under side of her sh.e.l.l, raising and lowering herself on her legs like a Boy Scout taking his morning setting-up exercises in a Summer camp.

After that she doesn't pay any more attention to her eggs. She leaves the sun to do her hatching for her. Both land and sea turtles--or, more properly speaking, the tortoises and the turtles--hatch their young in this way. The sea-turtles scramble up out of the water on their flippers, much as a seal does in climbing on a rock, and make their way back from the sh.o.r.e, great crowds of them, at nesting-time, to some stretch of sand, and there lay their eggs. This march of the mother turtles always takes place at night. When the young are hatched they dig their way up through the sand and make for the sea.

II. THE CRAB FAMILY

Another one of the water people who help make land and one that everybody knows, is the crayfish. Every small boy is afraid Mr. Crayfish will catch his little big toe sooner or later, when he goes swimming; although I never heard of a crayfish that did. But they never worry about _their_ toes--the crayfish don't. When they lose a whole foot even--as they often do--it grows right out again. The science people say this is because they belong to a low order in the animal world, but I think it would come in right handy for any of us--this way of regrowing not toe-nails alone, but toes and all--don't you?

The crayfish, as you may know, love to burrow in the mud, for you are always coming across their little mud towers along the margins of the brooks. Related to the crayfish are the crabs. Mother Nature seems to have been very fond of crabs--she has made them after so many different patterns and scattered them all over the world; in the deep sea, along the shallows of its sh.o.r.es, and on land. Those you are most apt to meet must have more or less business on land, for the shape of their legs shows that they are formed for walking rather than swimming. But go far out to sea and you'll find crabs with paddles on all four pairs of legs, like banks of oars; while others, living on the borders of the sea, have paddles only on the last pair.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SOUTH SEA ISLAND AND COCOANUT COLUMBUS

Here we are on an island of the Southern Seas--the home of a colony of cocoanut crabs. One of the members of the colony is climbing a tree to get a nut. "And who has a better right?" says he. "This tree," he might continue, "is the descendant of a nut that some of my ancestors sailed upon to this island; for a cocoanut, dropping into the water from a tree near some far sh.o.r.e, often carries on it the crab who had started to eat it. Then a current of the sea carries the nut and its pa.s.senger to some other island. Later cocoanut Santa Marias and their Columbuses reach the island in the same way, and so it becomes populated with both cocoanuts and crabs--which makes it very nice for the crabs!"]

One of the big families of crabs live on land most of the time and make burrows in which they live. These have legs specially fitted for digging. Like most of the crab family, the land-crab earns its living at night and, except in rainy weather, seldom leaves its burrow by day.

Like small boys, these crabs seem to love to play in the rain. The fact is they do this to keep their gills wet; for, although they spend most of their time on land, crabs breathe with their gills, like fish; and while some of them--as the mountain crab of the West Indies--live quite a distance back from the sea, they must have some moisture for their gills, and this they get, in part, in their damp cellars--the burrows.

But it's queer, isn't it, what different ways people have of looking at things? Take land crabs and turtles, for example. Turtles, when they lay their eggs, think the only thing is to get clear away from the water and put their eggs in an incubator, as we saw them do a few pages back. The land-crabs evidently think just the opposite; for no matter how far they may live away from the sea--one, two, even three miles sometimes--nothing will do but they must go to the water to lay their eggs. In April and May you'll see them swarming down by hundreds and thousands. And they'll climb right over you if you don't get out of their way!

"This is my busy day and I can't stop for anything," says Mrs. Crab.

Besides the work they do for the soil in grinding and mixing it, the crab people, like all the crustaceans, help a lot by adding lime to it, and that's one of the very best things you can do to soil, you know.

They add this lime when they change their clothes; that is, when they moult or cast their sh.e.l.ls. The sh.e.l.l they take off as if it were indeed a dress. They "unb.u.t.ton" it down the back. Sometimes, in trying to get out of the legs of the suit, they leave not only the leg covering but the leg itself. That leg is good for the soil, too, of course, and the loss of a leg doesn't bother a crab so very much. He just grows a new one, that's all!

These sh.e.l.ls--particularly the sh.e.l.ls of the largest species of crabs--not only contain a great deal of lime but carbon and phosphorus, also, and these are splendid soil stuff, too. In the smaller kinds of crabs--of crustaceans, generally--these sh.e.l.ls are mostly chitin, the stuff that the coverings of insects is made of.

The crustaceans, by the way, are closely related to the insects. You may _suspect_ this by comparing their shapes, but then you'll see there isn't any doubt about it when I tell you that in getting born from the egg, the crabs and their kin don't come out dressed in their final shape, but change after they are born, first into one shape and then into another, just as insects do. Each shape, as it comes along, looks funnier than the rest; that is, it looks funny to us, but not, naturally, to the crabs. It must seem just the thing to them, for they always dress the same way and look as solemn about it as a man does when he wears a monocle. In fact, they do something almost as funny as wearing a monocle. For many of them carry their eyes about, not on the end of a cord, to be sure, but on the end of a stick. These "sticks" are called foot stalks. And they're not a bad idea either--for a crab. By moving them around the crabs can keep much better posted on what is going on about them than they could otherwise; particularly as a crab always moves sidewise or backward. What good a monocle does, though, n.o.body knows.

III. THE STRANGER THAT MADE LONDON LAUGH

But if we can hardly look a crab in the eye and keep a straight face, what would we do if we met a duck-billed mole? We'd laugh right out! I'm sure of it, for that's what even the men of science did when they saw the first one that came to England. This strange foreigner--it came to London all the way from Australia--had a body like a mole. But you couldn't call it a mole. For one thing, it had a bill like a duck. Yet no more could you call it a duck; for, besides having a body like a mole, it had a tail like a beaver. Still I'm afraid the beavers wouldn't have owned it--hospitable as they are--even if they could have overlooked that bill. For--can you believe it?--this duck-billed, mole-bodied, beaver-tailed creature lays eggs!

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ANIMAL X FROM THE ANTIPODES

A mole's body, a duck's bill, a beaver's tail, this strange citizen of that land of strange animals, Australia, lays eggs like a bird and suckles its young like a p.u.s.s.y-cat! Do you wonder that the wise men of London laughed at the idea that there is any such creature--even when they were looking right at one?]

Yet the ducks just couldn't take it into their families either, for what else do you think it does? It suckles its young, like a p.u.s.s.y-cat! Talk about your sensations; it made the hit of the season--this Animal X from the Antipodes. The learned men of London town, they looked him up and they looked him down, and they came to the same conclusion, at first, that the old gentleman did when he saw the dromedary. They said: "They _ain't_ no such animal!" (Only, of course, being learned men, they used good grammar.)

They really did say that in effect, and you can't blame them; for, as if to complete the joke, the first member of the duck-billed mole family to move in scientific society came in like a Christmas turkey; in other words, he was a stuffed specimen. So the men of science said he wasn't _real_ at all; that he was just made up of the parts of _other_ animals.

But being true men of science, after all, they finally began looking up the stranger's record among his neighbors back in Australia, and they found there actually are living creatures in that land of strange creatures, just like that specimen, and that they live in burrows which they dig in the banks of the streams.