Natural history -- Massachusetts; Natural history -- Outdoor books; Plymouth County (Mass.)
How dependent these disembodied voices are upon the sun is seen
toward nightfall, when the shadows begin to grow long. Where these
fall across the grasses there grow triangles of silence which
travel fast. Oftentimes as the point of one of these progresses
you may locate a chirper by the sudden ceasing of his chirp and
find him in the tip of shadow, already numb. The black crickets
keep up their tune longest, singing from beneath sheltering stones
and bark or fallen leaves. With the direct sun vanish also other
summer pasture people who have made the warmth of the day
beautiful. Under an old apple tree the ground is yellow with the
apples that it has shed and here all through the sunny hours two
vanessa butterflies have alternately floated and feasted, one a
mourning cloak, the other a Compton tortoise, Vanessa antiopa and
Vanessa j-album. These are late arrivals that have come from the
cocoon upon a cold world and are doing their best to make good in
it. Both are of a species that are hardy beyond belief and both
may well winter in the crevice within the gnarled trunk of the old
tree into which they creep benumbed when the chill of night begins
to fall. The pasture at midday was bright with the yellow of
colias butterflies which dashed madly about from one fall
dandelion bloom to another, eager to eat enough while the warmth
should linger. I saw many of the American copper with them, these
with a more conspicuous white margin to the tiny wings than I have
ever seen before, a fall form I fancy rather than anything
permanently new in this rather variable insect.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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