The Animal World, A Book of Natural History Part 63

So, if the minnow had waited a few minutes longer hundreds of these little darts would have buried themselves in the soft parts of his body and stung him to death, and then the anemone would have swallowed him!

Now just touch the anemone with the tip of your finger. You need not be afraid to do so, for its little poisoned darts are not nearly strong enough to pierce your skin. There! do you see how its arms at once come closing in? It seems to be pushing them right down into the very middle of its body. Now they have entirely disappeared, and you cannot see them at all. The animal looks just like a shapeless lump of jelly.

Yes, it always does that when it is frightened, and also if it is left high and dry when the tide goes out. And when it catches a good-sized victim and swallows it, it generally remains closed up for at least a couple of days.

Now let us tell you another curious thing about the anemone. It looks as if it were growing out of the rock, doesn't it? If you try to push it loose, you will probably kill it before you succeed. Yet it can release it's sucker-like grip, and move about if it wishes to. This is only one of many very interesting things to be learned about these lovely creatures.

And here is another very beautiful thing which you must not miss. One would think the dark rock under the water had blossomed out into a small bed of filmy bluish pinks, only what you see is even more delicate and feathery. That is a patch of true corals; and it is most fortunate it was found here, for it is rarely seen, except when brought up in a dredge from water several fathoms deep.

Now let us see whether we cannot find some of the tube-worms which in feathery beauty are rivals of even the anemones and coral-polyps. Look down to the very bottom of the pool. Do you see that bunch of long, twisted tubes, which seem to be fastened to one of those big stones?

They are made by a very common sea-worm called the serpula, or sh.e.l.l-worm, for they are quite as often found attached to sh.e.l.ls as to stones. This worm never leaves the tube it forms about it out of the limy mucus thrown out of its skin, so that it has no use for feet; consequently these have become simply a row of bristles along its sides, by which the animal can hitch itself up and down, or forward and backward, within its case. Sometimes it may want to draw itself back into its tube very quickly, to save its head being bitten off by some fish or ravenous worm. So along its back it has a row of between thirteen and fourteen thousand little hooked teeth, with which it can take a firm hold of the lining of its tunnel. And if it is suddenly alarmed it just raises these teeth, and then jerks itself back into its tunnel with such wonderful speed that you can scarcely see what has become of it.

Now let us lift the bundle of tubes out of the water, and examine them a little more closely. Do you see that each one is closed, just a little way below the entrance, by a kind of scarlet stopper? That shows that the worm inside is alive. The stopper is shaped just like a tiny cork, and whenever the serpula retreats into its tube it pulls this odd little stopper in after it, and so prevents any of its enemies from getting in and devouring it, just as gastropods close the aperture of their sh.e.l.ls with the operculum.

If you were to put this bunch of tubes back into the water and watch it carefully for an hour or so, you would most likely see all the stoppers come out, one after another; and a few moments later you would see a bright scarlet tuft projecting out of the mouth of each tube. These tufts are the gills, by means of which the serpulas breathe. But at the slightest alarm the tufts would all disappear, and in less than a second every tube would be tightly corked up again, just as before.

On the Gulf coast of Florida, and throughout the West Indies, lives a larger relative of the serpula called "sea-flower," which secretes its tube upon the surface of large coral-heads, so that the tube becomes covered by the coral, leaving the opening still at the surface. "This opening," says Dr. Mayer, "is protected by a sharp spine, and is closed by the operculum of the worm when it withdraws its gills. When expanded these gills resemble a beautiful pink or purple pa.s.sion-flower, about three-quarters of an inch wide."

In such pools, and in the mud among the stones near low-tide mark, lie buried several kinds of worms which poke their heads up into the water above them when the tide comes in, and expand tufts of pink, or crimson, or yellow gills and tentacles, the latter used to catch minute floating food--mainly the microscopic larvae of various mollusks, worms, etc.--and also, in some cases, to drag to them the grains of sand out of which they construct their tubes. One of these is the fringed worm (_Cirratulus_) whose gills are like long orange-colored threads; and another the similar "blood-spot" (_Polycirrus_) whose great cl.u.s.ter of crimson tentacles about the mouth looks like a clot of blood on the sand. More often turned out by the naturalist's spade, however, is the tufted worm (_Amphitrite_) which dwells in a house made by itself, by taking a number of good-sized grains of sand, and sticking them together by means of a kind of glue which it pours out of its mouth, and which very soon "sets" and becomes quite hard, even though it is under water. This glue is so tough and strong that you can take the tube and give it quite a smart pull without tearing or hurting it in the least. And when the tube is finished Amphitrite makes that little fringe round the entrance by taking a number of very tiny grains and fastening them together in the form of threads.

There is one in this nook of our pool, now; and you may see the three pairs of blood-red tentacles which, with many pale yellow ones, the worm has thrust out into the clear water, breathing by means of some (the gills), and with the others capturing the invisible creatures upon which it mainly feeds.

The tubes of these worms usually run for several inches down into the sandy mud at the bottom of the pool, and are often carried down under the rocks, or big stones. So you will not find it very easy to dig them up. And if you startle Amphitrite herself, she will always wriggle at once down to the very bottom of her tubular fortress.

There! our four rambles are over, and although we have met with a great many interesting creatures, we have not seen nearly all that there is to be seen, either on the beach, or in the mud, or on the rocks, or in the pools which lie among them. But all the curiosities of the seash.o.r.e may be found by those who have patience and know how to use their eyes.

OUR WICKED WASTE OF LIFE

A Plea to Women for Consistency

One of the most puzzling things in life is why almost all our mothers and sisters and aunts and "dear teachers" continue to trim their hats with feathers.

They give their boys and girls books about birds, and teach love of nature in the schools, and sing and march on Bird Day, and pay money to missionaries to convert South Sea Islanders from wearing feather head-dresses, and then go down-town and buy bird-skins to deck their own heads! This confuses the boys and girls a good deal. How, they ask, can a mother preach against cruelty and vanity to her children when she continues to load her hat and theirs with feathers every one of which represents a crime against the laws of both G.o.d and man? The reason why lawmakers find it so difficult to enforce protective legislation is that the women demand dead birds, careless whether of useful species or not, no matter by what gory slaughter and violated laws obtained, as ministers to their vanity--and the law be hanged!

They will even wear these evidences of cruelty and crime to church, and listen unabashed to exhortations and prayers which others think ought to shrivel them with shame. A recent writer in "Hampton's Magazine"

describes his impressions of a scene of this kind in a Chicago church, whose preacher that morning had chosen Christian gentleness as his theme. This writer indulgently believes that the bird-bedecked listeners "did not know at what a cost, not in life alone, but in hard dollars and cents, they, and other persons equally careless and equally reckless, were securing the transient satisfaction of their immediate desires."

And he expresses himself as "equally sure that, if they did know, they would never again appear in public so savagely adorned."

We are sorry to be obliged to disagree with him. If they do not know, it is because they do not read and listen, and few American women, gentle or simple, are chargeable with negligence in that respect. The officers of the Audubon Societies, who have been laboring for years as vigorously as they know how, tell us there is no lack of information; but that, in general, women don't care, and can't be made to care what hat-birds cost either themselves or the country so long as they are "in style."

Apparently the only way to stop the ruin of our bird-life is for the general government to prohibit absolutely both import and export of any kind of bird-skins or feathers (except of the ostrich) intended or liable to be used in millinery; and for the States to stamp out dealing in feather tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs by a prohibitive licensing tax. Appeals to the women are useless. The only way is to attack the trade.

Nevertheless, let us make one more effort. Here are four cardinal facts, for instance, relating to the aigrettes, or "ospreys" which you covet, showing what they cost:

(1) Aigrettes are produced only by white herons, and only during the breeding-season; therefore (2) the parent birds must be shot in order to obtain the plumes; hence (3) the young birds in the nests must starve, in consequence of the death of the parents; consequently (4) all statements that the plumes are manufactured or are gathered after being molted by the adult birds are false.

Here is a picture of how they are got, and it can be verified by photographs:

"Notwithstanding the extreme heat and the myriads of mosquitos, I determined to revisit the locality during my holidays, in order to obtain one picture only--namely, that of a white crane, or egret, feeding its young. When near the place, I could see some large patches of white, either floating in the water or reclining on the fallen trees in the vicinity of the egrets' rookery. This set me speculating as to the cause of this unusual sight. As I drew nearer, what a spectacle met my gaze--a sight that made my blood fairly boil with indignation. There, strewn on the floating water-weed, and also on adjacent logs, were at least fifty carca.s.ses of large white and smaller plumed egrets--nearly one-third of the rookery, perhaps more--the birds having been shot off their nests containing young. What a holocaust! Plundered for their plumes. What a monument of human callousness! There were fifty birds ruthlessly destroyed, besides their young (about two hundred) left to die of starvation! This last fact was betokened by at least seventy carca.s.ses of the nestlings, which had become so weak that their legs had refused to support them, and they had fallen from the nests into the water below, and had been miserably drowned; while, in the trees above, the remainder of the parentless young ones could be seen staggering in the nests, some of them falling with a splash into the water, as their waning strength left them too exhausted to hold up any longer, while others simply stretched themselves out on the nest and so expired.

Others, again, were seen trying in vain to attract the attention of pa.s.sing egrets, which were flying with food in their bills to feed their own young, and it was a pitiful sight indeed to see these starvelings with outstretched necks and gaping bills imploring the pa.s.sing birds to feed them. What a sickening sight!"

A like gruesome story is given by William L. Finley, agent of the National a.s.sociation of Audubon Societies, after he had explored the region about Lake Malheur, Oregon, where formerly thousands of white herons bred, but now none are to be found--all absolutely exterminated by plume-hunters. In Florida an agent of this a.s.sociation was lately murdered while trying to defend a rookery from plume-hunters.

Every aigrette--and almost every other wild-bird's feather you wear--represents a broken law, and in buying it you become a voluntary partner in crime.

The manufacturing milliners and dealers realize this, and consequently resort to all sorts of lies and disguises and subterfuges, which your buying encourages, for it sustains the b.l.o.o.d.y business of the illegal feather-hunters. Some dealers a.s.sert that none but imported feathers are now sold by them. This is not true, but if it were, the wearing of them is wrong, not only because it encourages the devastation of other countries, but also because it keeps up the general fashion. The same may be said in answer to the plea of the milliner that her ornaments were "made up" of chicken-feathers. You can't be sure of that, and you are setting a harmful example.

"Here, of course," remarks Reginald W. Kauffman, in the illuminative "Hampton's" article already quoted, "is involved merely a question of individual ethics, but if the trifling life of a bird is a matter of small moment even to the gentler s.e.x--so long as the eyes of that s.e.x are not outraged by an actual sight of the b.l.o.o.d.y slaughter--at least a matter of very great moment is the fact that the rise in the price of your foodstuffs, the yearly increase in your market-bill, is the direct result of those feathers in your bonnet, those plumes upon your daughter's hat....

"Difficult as the figures are to get, such as may be acquired are appalling. Surely you cannot read them and remain unmoved. England, by importing the bird of paradise at the rate of six thousand a year, has practically exterminated that species. In four months one London house disposed of eight hundred thousand East and West Indian bird-skins; the United States alone sends to the British Isles four hundred thousand humming-birds every twelve months, which helps bring the English grand total up to thirty million birds a year.

"And we keep a comfortable figure for home consumption. In one year a single Chicago dealer has been known to handle 32,000 humming-birds in one consignment, 32,000 gulls, and the wings of 300,000 other birds. In all, the National Audubon a.s.sociation puts our total at about 150,000,000 birds a year. The European continent repeats this, and so you have the women of the 'civilized' world, with the omission of our South American cousins, wearing 300,000,000 birds every year.

"Legislation is here, as always, powerless in the face of fashionable womankind."

Another point of view is that of good taste. A single large feather or a shapely wing--in themselves beautiful objects and well adapted to decorative effect--may be so applied as really to adorn a lady's hat, or a man's for that matter, very pleasingly; and if it is the trophy of the skill of some friend, obtained in fair sport, it may embody a delightful sentiment as well. It was in this simple, wasteful, and un.o.bjectionable manner that feathers were originally employed as tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. But fierce trade compet.i.tion among milliners catering to the foolish cry for "novelties" regardless of becomingness in any sense, has developed absurdities of head-gear which often make their wearers utterly ridiculous.

What possible justification in art or common sense is there in setting a dead animal on a hat? If any can be found, surely the effigy should be lifelike and not some horrible travesty. If ribbons and flowers are not enough ornaments to set off pretty faces, why not wind shining snake-skins about the crown of the hat; or utilize our resplendent moths and beetles as tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs? They are elegant in form and color, varied, preservable, and by no means costly. Moreover, the general destruction which would follow the entry of such a fashion would reduce the insect enemies of our crops and garden-plants--but women seem to care nothing about that aspect of the case.

"The insects kill the crops," remarks Kauffman, "the birds kill the insects, and we--for the most part in order to trim your hats for you--kill the birds. A study of the government reports will show that crop losses from insects are rarely less than 10 per cent. and sometimes as high as 50."

We may now turn to another phase of our subject--the waste of game, fur-bearing animals, and other useful or beautiful creatures.

When Europeans first came to this continent the bison and elk roamed everywhere west of the Blue Ridge. By the middle of the nineteenth century all had disappeared east of the Great Plains, as completely as had the salmon which used to throng in our eastern rivers. And here, a few years later, both were almost utterly destroyed by wretched pot-hunters.

The moose, elk, antelope, mountain sheep and goats, beaver, sea-otter, and many other game and fur animals of North America have also suffered so terribly under relentless persecution that they now are found only in small numbers in very remote places. The sea-otter, of which at the beginning of the nineteenth century more than 15,000 were killed every year, has become so scarce that its coat, in good condition, is now worth $1,000 to the hunter.

The horrible stories of the butchery of the fur-seals and the pa.s.senger-pigeon need not be recited. The building up of great cities made a market for game and fish, and coincident therewith the market-hunter and the market-fisherman came into existence. Under these conditions the destruction went on merrily, until, in the early eighties, observant sportsmen and naturalists began to realize that extermination threatened such game-birds as the prairie-chicken, the quail, the ruffed grouse, the wood-duck, the canvasback duck, and even the well-known mallard and teal.

"Coincident with this great hegira to the woods," we are told by G. O.

Shields, in a late number of "Collier's Weekly," "there appeared on the scene a type of man that has become known and recognized everywhere as the American game-hog. This depraved creature developed a fondness for killing every living thing he could find, whether edible or not, or whether he needed it for food or not. All he cared for was to kill, kill, kill. He loved to stop a beautiful animal in its flight and put it to death, or to see a bird double up in the air and fall with shot-pellets through its body.

"The compet.i.tion became so strong between these game-hogs that they got to challenging one another to combats in the field, and contests were arranged weeks ahead, large stakes being deposited on the result.... The nineteenth-century 'side-hunt' became a feature of many rural districts.

"Is it any wonder, then, that decent men came to rebel against this savage slaughter? Good sportsmen, naturalists, and laymen became so disgusted with it that they went before their legislatures and demanded that it be stopped. Laws were accordingly enacted in many States ... and recently legislation for the preservation of the game has become a science, and a few men are devoting their best thought and their best energies to it.

"But the game-hog and the fish-hog bid defiance to all game-laws, written and unwritten. No State employs enough game-wardens to police all of its territory, so the ravaging of the wild went on."

To the correction of this evil no one has contributed more energetically than Mr. Shields and some other editors of periodicals devoted to field-sports and recreation. They have given the game-hog so disgraceful a notoriety, and have brought down upon his head such scorn from decent sportsmen, that he has been largely suppressed.

Here, too, mothers, wives, and sisters, are largely at fault; but they may plead ignorance much more plausibly than in the case of their own sins of hat-tr.i.m.m.i.n.g. Why should they applaud useless slaughter, dictated by vanity and blood-l.u.s.t, in the men over whom they have influence? Is it a manly or an admirable thing?

These ignorant and thoughtless women have still time to repent and force their men-folks to behave like gentlemen. There is still game enough to bring about a revival of plenty for all reasonable sportsmen of the next generation as well as this. There are laws enough, too, to protect it, but between the ignorance of the legislators and their fear of offending the very game-butchers against whom the laws are directed (who unfortunately have votes), they will not appropriate the money necessary to provide game-wardens and other means of enforcing the laws properly.

Here is where the influence of every fair-minded woman and patriotic man can be tellingly exerted. Show the lawmakers that the good opinion of the decent half of the community is better worth having than that of the meaner half; and see that _your_ men-folks are not in the latter cla.s.s.