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C. J. Cornish - The Naturalist on the Thames
It would not be human if some belief had not arisen that the insects that fly by night imitate human
thieves and rob those which toil by day. There has always been a tradition that the death's-head moth, the
largest of all our moths, does this, and that it creeps into the hives and robs the bees, which are said to be
terrified by a squeaking noise made by the gigantic moth, which to a bee must appear as the roc did to its
victims. It is said that the bees will close up the sides of the entrance to the hive with wax, so as to make
it too small for the moth to creep in. Probably this is a fable, due to the pirate badge which the moth bears
on its head. But it is certainly fond of sweet things, and as it is often caught in empty sugar-barrels, it is
quite possible that it does come to the hive-door at night and alarm the inmates in its search for honey.
[1] In the illustration it was impossible to photograph butterflies actually sleeping. They show their
attitude, but not the degree to which the wings are flattened into a very acute angle.
CRAYFISH AND TROUT
About the middle of August, when walking by one of the locks on a disused canal in the Ock Valley, I
saw a man engaged in a very artistic mode of catching crayfish. The lock was very old, and the
brickwork above water covered with pennywort and crane's-bill growing where the mortar had rotted at
the joints. In these same joints below water the crayfish had made holes or homes of some sort, and were
sitting at the doors with their claws and feelers just outside, waiting, like Mr. Micawber, for something to
turn up. To meet their views the crayfish catcher had cut a long willow withe. From the tapering tip of
this he had cut the wood, leaving the bark, which had been carefully slit and the woody tip extracted
from it. This pendant of bark he had made into a running noose, and leaning over the bank he worked it
over the crayfish's claws and then snared them. It was a neat adaptation of local means to an end; for if
you think of it, string would not have answered, because it would not remain rigid, and wire would be too
stiff for the job.
Crayfish catching, until lately one of the minor fisheries of the Thames, is now a vanished industry. Ten
years ago the banks of the river from Staines to the upper waters at Cricklade were honeycombed with
crayfish holes, like sandmartins' nests in a railway cutting. These holes were generally not more than
eighteen inches below the normal water line of the river. In winter when the stream was full fresh holes
were dug higher up the bank. In summer when the water fell these were deserted. The result was that
there were many times more holes than crayfish, and that for hundreds of miles along the Thames and its
tributaries these burrows made a perforated border of about three feet deep. The almost complete
destruction of the crayfish was due to a disease, which first appeared near Staines, and worked its way up
the Thames, with as much method as enteric fever worked its way down the Nile in the Egyptian
Campaign after Omdurman. The epidemic is well known in France, where a larger kind of crayfish is
reared artificially in ponds, and serves as the material for bisque d'ecrevisses, and as the most
elegant scarlet garnish for cold and hot dishes of fish in Paris restaurants; but it was new to recent
experience of the Thames. Perhaps that is why its effects were so disastrous. The neat little fresh-water
lobsters turned almost as red as if they had been boiled, crawled out of their holes, and died. Under some
of the most closely perforated banks they lay like a red fringe along the riverside under the water. Near
Oxford, and up the Cherwell, Windrush, and other streams they were, before the pestilence, so numerous
that making crayfish pots was as much a local industry as making eel-pots, the smaller withes, not much
larger than a thick straw, being used for this purpose. Most cottages near the river had one or two of these
pots, which were baited on summer nights and laid in the bottom of the stream near the crayfish holes. It
must be supposed that they only use them by day, and come out by night, just as lobsters do, to roam
about and seek food on a larger scale than that which they seize as it floats past their holes by day. That
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