The Strangest Things in the World: A Book About Extraordinary Manifestations of NatureHenry, Thomas R. (Thomas Robert)
History
The Strangest Things in the World: A Book About Extraordinary Manifestations of Nature
Henry, Thomas R. (Thomas Robert)
Animal behavior; Natural history
The chick, almost exactly the color of the dead leaves among which it
lies, remains essentially invisible. Nests are found only by accident.
Whippoorwills live almost exclusively on night-flying insects,
especially moths and mosquitoes. They have been recorded, however, as
sometimes hunting for worms, beetles and ants under bark, or on the
ground.
The bird makes no particular effort to conceal itself from humans.
Apparently it does not regard them as dangerous. There are cases where
it actually has lit on the head of a man standing motionless in the
dark. The female has been observed to fly about carrying her young
between her thighs. She also, it has been reported, sometimes carries
them in her bill, but there is no satisfactory evidence of this.
The whippoorwill is fond of taking dust baths. Sometimes one is caught
by the lights of an approaching auto as it dusts itself in the middle
of a country road.
The bird is remarkable for the regularity of its song and for the
number of times the melancholy refrain is repeated without a pause.
From 150 to 200 is not unusual. The naturalist John Burroughs claimed
once to have counted 1058 such repetitions. The song is continuous from
dusk until about 9:30 and from about 2 until dawn. It is heard rarely
in the intervening hours.
The whippoorwill, it is pointed out in a Smithsonian report, has come
to depend almost exclusively on darkness for its protection. For this
reason it has suffered little, as have many other birds, with the
cutting away of the forests and the advances of cities. Its enemies in
the dark are some hawks, owls and foxes, but has exceptional powers of
flight which often enable it to escape even when discovered.
The birds linger in the north only until the first killing frosts which
destroy or drive into shelter the insects on which they feed. Then they
start their night migrations southward which sometimes carry them as
far as Central America.
_Ants Can Smell Almost Anything_
The sense of smell is remarkably acute in all ants—at least equalling
that of dogs.
The outstanding ant odor is that of formic acid, which is somewhat like
that of illuminating gas, exuded from the bodies of all species. But
this is only the smell of the race. It must be subject to an infinite
number of variations to most of which ants alone are sensitive. They
know their comrades, even after a long separation. Famed naturalist
Sir John Lubbock once returned some ants to their old nest after a
separation of 21 months. They were amicably received and evidently
recognized as friends. On the other hand if a strange ant is placed in
a nest of her own species she is at once attacked.
Dr. William M. Wheeler insists that even the human nose can detect some
different species and even, in a few cases, different castes by their
odors. Thus, over and above the formic acid smell, the smell of one
species suggests ether, of another lemon-geranium, and of still another
rotten coconuts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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