The Adventures of a Grain of Dust Part 23

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE OLD HOME PLACE

This is the farm of some Agricultural Ants in Texas. See the granary and the roads leading to it? They collect and store the seeds of a plant which from this fact is called "ant-rice." It looks like oats and tastes like rice. All plants growing around the nest--which is also called the granary--the ants cut away, so clearing a s.p.a.ce for 10 or 12 feet. Roads 5 inches broad near the nest, but narrowing as they recede, are made for hundreds of feet in different directions.]

In tropical America there is a species of ant that raises "mushrooms"; at least a kind of fungus that pa.s.ses for mushrooms with the ants. They don't exactly set the mushrooms out, but they save time by planting both the mushrooms and the leaves that make them as one and the same job.

This is how they do it. They climb the trees, cut circular pieces of leaf with their scissor-like jaws and carry them back to low, wide mounds in the neighborhood of which they allow nothing to grow; the purpose being, as it is supposed, to ventilate the galleries of their homes by keeping a clear s.p.a.ce about the mound.

HOW THE ANTS RAISE MUSHROOMS

The leaves are used as a fertilizer on which grow a small species of mushrooms. The leaves are first left out to be dampened by the rain, and are carried into the ants' cellars before they are quite dry. In very dry weather the ants work only during the cool of the day and at night.

Occasionally inexperienced ants bring in gra.s.s or unsuitable leaves, but these are carried out and thrown away by older members of the family.

But you see how valuable all these leaves are to the soil.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ANTS CARRYING LEAVES FOR THE MUSHROOM CELLAR

You'd never guess what the ants are going to do with those leaves! Read what it says on this page about these six-legged epicures.]

MR. HAMSTER'S THREs.h.i.+NG HARVESTER

Of course, we always expect the ants to do extraordinary things, but one of those four-legged farmers I mentioned in the beginning of the chapter antic.i.p.ated the principle of the very latest type of thres.h.i.+ng-machine. It's a fact. This remarkable little animal thres.h.i.+ng-machine is called the hamster. He is found in Europe east of the Rhine and in certain portions of Asia. He does both his cutting and thres.h.i.+ng in his field; something the Gauls did in the days of the Romans in a crude way, but which men of our day have only got to doing in recent years. He pulls down the wheat ear, cuts it off between his teeth, and then threshes it by drawing the heads through his mouth. The grain falls right into sacks as fast as it is threshed; just as it does in those huge, combined reapers and threshers that you see on our big wheat farms. Mr. Hamster's sacks are his cheek-pouches, one on each side. When these are filled, this little thres.h.i.+ng-machine turns itself into an auto, a commercial truck, and off it goes with its load of wheat to the little barn hidden in the ground. These cheek-pouches, by the way, reach from the hamster's cheeks clear back to his shoulders, and both of these pouches will together hold something like a thousand grains of wheat. He empties them by holding his paws tight against the side of his face and then pus.h.i.+ng forward. Rather a clever unloading device, too; don't you think so? Just as good for Mr. Hamster's purposes as the endless-chain system at the Buffalo grain elevator that Mr.

Kipling admired so much.

And in the mere matter of the amount of grain handled, the work of the hamster is not to be laughed at. The peasant farmers are very glad to find a hamster granary, which, of course, they promptly take possession of by due process of law:

"The good old rule, the simple plan That they shall take who have the power, And they shall hold who can."

One of Mr. Hamster's neighbors, the field-rat of Hungary and Asia, stores his grain right in the house--the place where he lives with his family. Mr. Hamster, however, has his barns separate from his home.

Sometimes he has one, sometimes two; and the older members of the community may have four or five.

II. MR. VOLE AND HIS ROOT CELLAR

The farmer I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, who is so thrifty about his root crops and so neat, belongs to the Vole family. He lives away over in Siberia and his full name is _Arvicola economus_. In gathering his crop of roots, he first digs a little trench around them and lays them bare. Then he cleans them off nicely so as not to fill his storehouse with dirt; cuts them up in sizes convenient for carrying, and then hauls them home and piles them up in little cellars made specially for them.

He only takes one piece at a time, walking along backward and pulling it after him with his teeth. He travels long distances in this fas.h.i.+on, going around tufts of gra.s.s, stones, and logs that lie in the way. When he gets home, he backs in the front door and into the living-room, and then into the barns which are back of the living-room. There are several of these and they are at the end of a long crooked pa.s.sage.

Some of the Vole family make a specialty of wheat. One species of these wheat harvesters used to be common in Greece. He made such a nuisance of himself--from the Greek farmer's standpoint--that the Greeks had a special G.o.d to get after him; Apollo Myoktonos, "Apollo, Destroyer of Mice."[26] For the vole is just a kind of field-mouse. The runs of these wheat-harvesting voles are eight to twelve inches below the ground, and are connected with the surface by vertical holes. The end of the run is enlarged into a big room for the nest, and there are special rooms leading from the main runway that are used for the storing of the grain.

These voles do their harvesting in the evening. Standing on their hind legs and holding to the stock with their little paws as a beaver clasps a tree, they cut off the wheat head with their teeth. They work very fast.

[26] Strictly speaking, I presume this was the same Apollo who carried the sun about in his chariot, and "Destroyer of Mice" was one of his many nicknames.

HOW DID THESE FARMERS LEARN TO STORE?

Neither the voles nor any other of these interesting farmers and warehous.e.m.e.n used to get much credit for what they did. The fact that they helped themselves to some of the good things of earth annoyed Man, of course, and then, when it came to the matter of intelligence, conceited Mr. Man said: "Oh, _that's_ just _instinct_." But nowadays when scientists have begun to study to find out what "instinct" really is, it is thought that man's brother animals, although they are born with more knowledge of how to do things--with more of what we call "instinct"--have also learned by experience just as man did. It is argued that the storing habit was forced on animals wherever the climate cut off the food-supply for a time--either because it was too cold or too hot. The idea of putting something by for a rainy day appealed particularly to the burrowers because they are a timid lot. Not being able to defend themselves very well against their enemies they were obliged to pack up what they could and hurry to some hidden eating-place. That is where the cheek-pouches, which many of them have, come in handy. They are also very industrious, and as the seeds and nuts on which they lived began to ripen, they just couldn't resist the impulse to gather and gather and gather more than they could possibly eat at the time. So, as a result of this habit, food piled up in their underground homes. Then, as they were kept indoors by cold weather or by their enemies, they took to eating more and more from the pantry shelf, and thus the members of the family that were the busiest and, therefore, had the most to eat would naturally survive and leave children of a similar disposition, while the less thrifty would die off.

III. THE LONG WINTER SLEEP

Some of these forehanded people, instead of putting their Winter supply of food in the ground, put it on their bones. That is to say, before turning in for the Winter, they get as fat as can be and then live on this fat until Spring. A great advantage of this system of storage is that it is particularly pleasant work--you eat and eat and enjoy your meals, that's all. Another advantage is that you can't be robbed of your store as easily as the hamster, for example, frequently is. You carry it right with you wherever you go.

There are a lot of curious things about this hibernation. Not only will warmth arouse the sleepers but also extreme cold, and after the extreme cold may come another sleep from which the sleepers never awaken; in other words, too much cold kills them. So the object of burying one's self as the ground-hog does, or under the snow as rabbits do, or in hollow caves and trees as Brer Bear does, is to keep from getting too cold. Sometimes two or more "bunk" together, as little pigs do on cold March days. The body of each helps to keep his bedfellows warm.

IT'S THE COLD THAT MAKES ONE DROWSY

It is the cold itself that seems to make hibernating animals feel sleepy; just as it does human beings. At a moderate temperature, say 45 or 50 degrees, dormice and hedgehogs will wake up, eat something, and then go to sleep again. The dormouse usually wakes in every twenty-four hours, while the hedgehog's Winter naps are two or three days long.

Hunger seems to be the cause of their waking, just as it is with babies.

The little dormouse, as the air grows colder, gradually dozes off, and his breathing is very deep and slow. As the temperature rises, he begins to take shorter and more rapid breaths and gradually wakes up. Then, if he is in his own little home under the ground, he feeds on the nuts and other foods that he stored in Autumn and drops off again. He sleeps from five to seven months, depending on the weather.

Moles and shrews, so far as observation goes, don't hibernate. The moles simply dig deeper, and there they find worms and insects that are buried away from the reach of frost. The shrews hunt spiders and hundred-legged worms and larvae in holes and crannies of the soil or beneath leaves of ground plants and old logs.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LITTLE HEDGEHOG IN MAN'S HAND]

A queer thing is that the hedgehog, which belongs to the same family as the shrew and the mole, is dead to the world all Winter. Like all complete hibernators he stops breathing entirely. The reason for this difference between the hedgehog and the mole is that the mole doesn't need to go to sleep, because he digs below the frost-line. As for the shrews, they have little bodies and are very active, and so get themselves food and keep warm, while the hedgehog is so much bigger and slower that, when there is so little to eat and it is so cold, he would either freeze or starve to death if he went about looking for food. He finds it cheaper to turn in and sleep than to work.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A HEDGEHOG AND HER BABIES]

None of the tree-squirrels seem to take any unusually long naps in the Winter. We often see them around on pleasant days in the parks and in the woods. They run out, get a few nuts from their stores, and then back again to their nests, but the chipmunks and the gophers, who are closely related to the squirrels, stay from late Autumn to Spring in their burrows, where they have plenty of food stowed away, and they sleep most of the time. In the home of four chipmunks was found a pint of wheat, a quart of nuts, a peck of acorns, and two quarts of buckwheat, besides a lot of corn and gra.s.s seed; all to feed four fat chipmunks. So, with such plentiful supplies, it is not surprising that after their long Winter sleep the chipmunks are as sleek as can be and as fat as b.u.t.ter, while Mr. Bear comes out in the Spring lean and with his hair all mussed up and as hungry as--well, as hungry as a bear!

All the bear family, except the polar bears, retire to caves or some sheltered spot under a ledge of a rock or the roots of a big tree. Among the polar bears the rule seems to be that it's Mamma Bear only who goes to bed for the Winter. She is careful to put on enough fat not only for herself, but so that the babies that come along in the Spring will have plenty of milk. She is buried by snow that drifts on her and her breath melts a funnel up to the fresh air.

IV. MR. GROUND-HOG AND HIS SHADOW

The woodchuck, like the bear, is a "meat-packer." People talk about him more or less in February. His other name is "ground-hog" and his shadow is quite as famous as he is. But is there anything in that old weather saw? Well, yes and no. You see, it's like this: Mr. Ground-Hog goes to bed very early in the Fall--long before the cold weather sets in--and so he is up very early the next Spring; long before the snow is all gone and, as it is with the other all-Winter sleepers, a little extra warmth may wake him up. Along toward morning, you know, we all begin to stir around in our beds and get half awake. So in addition to the fact that it is nearly daybreak for him--that is to say, Springtime--let there come along a bright, warm day in February--the second is as good as any other--and Mr. Ground-Hog is likely to come out of his hole. And, if he does, of course he will see his shadow, after which there is likely to be quite a lot of cold weather.

HOW WEATHER AVERAGES UP

Not that his shadow makes any difference, but the point is that if you have much warm weather _early_ in February you are likely to have colder weather _later_ and running on into March. It's just the law of averages, that's all. You see it running through the year--this averaging up of weather; it just sways back and forth like a pendulum.

Take it in any storm of rain or snow; first the clear sky, then the clouds, then the downfall, and after that the clear sky again. Take any month as a whole, or a year as a whole, and it's the same way; you get about so much rain, so much suns.h.i.+ne, so much heat and cold. The United States Weather Bureau went to work once and, from the records, cla.s.sified the storms for the last thirty years, and they found that about fifteen storms each year start over the region of the West Gulf States, twelve begin over the mountains of Colorado, forty cross the country from the North Pacific by way of Was.h.i.+ngton and Oregon; and so on, just about so many from each region each year.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Last Snow, by Lippincott_]

And records and old diaries, going back a hundred years, show that the longer the period you examine for weather facts, the closer the average.

The weather for one ten-year period will be almost as much like any other ten-year period, as the peas in a pea sh.e.l.l are like each other.

Coming back to the subject of February weather, we find in the diary of an old resident of Philadelphia in 1779: "The Winter was mild, and particularly the month of February, when trees were in bloom." He doesn't say anything about the ground-hog, but there is this to be said of the sharper changes of February and March, that at this season the earth is getting more and more warmed up and yet the cold winds from the North don't like to go; so there is a constant wrestling-match, and it is the wrestling of the winds one way and another that brings the changes of the weather. So if the South Winds get the best of it early in February, the North Winds, with their cold weather, are likely to win later in the month, and vice versa. Moreover, if you believe in the ground-hog proverb you are apt to _notice_ the warm days (or cold days, as the case may be) for the next six weeks after February 2, and you _won't_ notice so much the weather that doesn't fit your proverb! It's a way we all have; _seeing_ the things that go to prove what we believe and _overlooking_ the things that don't.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MR. GROUND-HOG AND HIS SHADOW

"But is there anything in the old weather saw? Well, yes and no. Mr.

Ground-Hog goes to bed early in the Fall and is up early next Spring.

Let there come a bright, warm day in February--the second is as good as any--and Mr. G.-H. is likely to come out and see his shadow. And if you have warm weather early in February you are likely to have colder weather later. It's the law of averages, that's all."]

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