by Ruskin Bond
The World Outside My Window
Ruskin Bond has been writing for over sixty years, and now has over 120 titles in print—novels, collections of short stories, poetry, essays, anthologies and books for children. His first novel, The Room on the Roof, received the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Award in 1957. He has also received the Padma Shri (1999), the Padma Bhushan (2014) and two awards from Sahitya Akademi—one for his short stories and another for his writings for children. In 2012, the Delhi government gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award.
Born in 1934, Ruskin Bond grew up in Jamnagar, Shimla, New Delhi and Dehradun. Apart from three years in the UK, he has spent all his life in India, and now lives in Mussoorie with his adopted family.
Published by
Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2016
7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj
New Delhi 110002
Copyright © Ruskin Bond 2016
Cover art: Lembrik Anastasia/Shutterstock
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.
ISBN: 978-81-291-4179-8
First impression 2016
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.
Contents
The Wonderful World of Insects
The Wonderful World of Insects
The Life of the Butterfly
Butterfly Time
The Colour of Insects
The Dragonfly
The Firefly
Firefly in My Room
The Ladybird Beetle
The Honeybee
Miniature Insects
Some Insect Giants
Music in the Trees
Ants and Ant Lions
Walk Tall
Scorpions
The Spider in Her Parlour
Insects in Disguise
Birdsong in the Mountains
At the Bird Bath
A Wilderness in New Delhi
A Bush at Hand Is Good for Many a Bird
Roosting in the Semul
Birdlife in the City
Owls in the Family
Birds of the Night
Birdsong in the Mountains
Guests Who Fly in from the Forest
The Whistling Schoolboy
The Loveliness of Ferns
The Coconut Tree
Trees of the Himalayas
The Loveliness of Ferns
Cacti and Succulents
The Jasmine
The Flax
The Glory Ley
The Water Lily
Wild Flowers Near a Mountain Stream
All Is Life
Section 1
The Wonderful World of Insects
The Wonderful World of Insects
When you have some time to spare, make a list of all the different insects that you can name. If you can put more than twenty names on your list, you will probably do better than the average person. But suppose you knew the name of every kind of insect in India or even in the world. If you were to write them all down, it would take you at least a month, without stopping to sleep or eat, to complete your list. There are over a million species, with thousands more being discovered each year.
When you have made your list, look it over carefully, for it is quite possible that you have included some animals that are not insects at all. Scorpions, spiders and mites are often mistaken for insects, but—though I have included them in this book—they belong to another group of small animals. If you know what to look for, it is quite easy to tell whether or not an animal is an insect.
A moth, a honeybee and a mosquito do not look very much alike, yet each is an insect. If you examine them, you will find certain similarities. Each one of these animals has six legs, as all insects have, with a body divided into three parts: a head, a centre part, and an abdomen. If you remember these two characteristics, you will be able to recognize an insect. The next time you look at a spider, you will see that it has not six but eight legs, and its body only two parts instead of three. For this reason it is not called an insect.
The skeleton of an insect is external, and the muscles and nerves inside are not only protected by this outer covering but combine with it to make the creature surprisingly strong and durable. For example, a beetle can support, without collapsing, some eight hundred times its own weight!
Insects are found almost everywhere—from steaming jungles to polar regions, in the soil, in the air and in the water. They seem to be able to live and thrive under almost any conditions. They have no lungs but breathe through air ducts in the sides of the body, the air being circulated to all parts through an intricate system of tiny tubes.
In beauty and colour some insects have no equal in the animal world, while structurally each one is a miracle.
The compound eyes of an insect are composed of many units or separate eyes, each of which transmits an image of what is seen to the brain. They enable the insect to detect the slightest movement of its enemy or prey.
The number of eye-units vary with different insects. The silver fish has 12, some ants have 50, cockroaches 1,800, houseflies 4,000, butterflies 17,000 and dragonflies from 20,000 to 30,000. In addition to the compound eyes, most insects have simple eyes—usually three placed on top of the forehead—which only distinguish between light and dark. Some beetles have two simple eyes placed on the back of the head.
The energy of an insect is tremendous. A flea can jump over one hundred times its height. A mosquito in flight has a wing-beat of three hundred per second. A dragonfly can attain a speed of nearly sixty miles an hour. The Painted Lady butterfly makes a migratory trip from North Africa to as far as Iceland.
Anyone who has stepped on a cockroach, been bitten by a mosquito or bothered by flies, will tell you that some insects are a nuisance. They not only interfere with our activities at times, but they also do damage to the extent of crores of rupees each year in our country alone. Most of the damage is done by insects that feed on plants that we use, insects such as the cotton-destroying boll weevil, the potato beetle and the tobacco hornworm. Also, some kinds of insects—especially flies—carry diseases, and we try to control them on this account.
But not all insects are harmful.
If all insects were to suddenly disappear from the earth, it would not be long before many other living things would vanish too, possibly even mankind.
Many vegetables and flowering plants would die, for these plants cannot bear fruit or seeds unless an insect transfers their pollen. Fishes and birds that feed on insects would vanish, and many of the animals that depend, in turn, on these fishes and birds for food would soon starve.
Once a link in nature’s chain of life is broken or removed, the entire chain is in danger of falling apart.
The Life of the Butterfly
If we catch a female butterfly and keep it in a suitable cage, it will lay eggs. The eggs are small white seed-like things, laid singly on the leaves of a plant. If we keep these eggs, they will presently hatch into caterpillars. These are somewhat worm-like in
appearance, with legs and sucker-feet; they are totally different from butterflies in habits and structure.
Caterpillars eat the leaves of plants, and moult (shed their skin) as they grow larger. At each moult the colour changes very slightly and the caterpillar comes out much larger. There are five such moults, and at the end of twelve or fifteen days the caterpillar attains its full size. It now ceases to feed, becomes uneasy; it is preparing for another, different moult.
The caterpillar fastens a small pad of silk at some point on the leaf of the plant, and fixing the hooks of its tail-feet in the silk, hangs itself head downwards from the pad. The skin bursts and is thrown off and the insect is seen hanging from the leaf. It is now completely changed in appearance and is called a chrysalis—a rounded green object, with pretty gold markings. There are no limbs, no mouth, no eyes. This curious creature hangs motionless from the plant for six days, taking no food and appearing to be asleep.
At the end of six days, the outer skin again bursts and a large insect comes out. This walks feebly about for a few minutes whilst its large wings expand and spread out. These wings become firm and stiff, and we see that it is the butterfly again, similar to the one we first caught. This butterfly will fly away, mate and lay eggs, which will again hatch into caterpillars.
Similar changes take place in the life of every butterfly. We see it in four stages—the egg, the caterpillar, the chrysalis and the butterfly.
Caterpillars have many enemies, and only a small percentage survive to turn into butterflies. Birds eat them. So do ants. And every tree swarms with spiders, not web spiders but wolf spiders, which run about in quest of their prey. Then come wasps and ichneumon flies, and these, from the caterpillar’s point of view, are of two sorts—those that will carry him to their own quarters as food for their children, and those that leave their children with the caterpillar for the purpose of free board and lodging.
The ichneumon fly waits till its victim is sleeping, and then, in one moment, its work is done. It has laid its eggs on or in the body of the caterpillar, and the larva which hatches nourishes itself at the expense of its host. The caterpillar continues to live and feed, moulting as usual; the parasite meanwhile becomes larger and finally causes the death of its host. A caterpillar may contain one or many parasites. As many as seventy small ichneumons have been reared from the body of a cotton stem-boring caterpillar.
Thus we see that the ichneumon fly is a beneficial insect to man, since it is a natural check upon the increase of destructive caterpillars that attack growing crops. There is a different caterpillar for nearly every kind of edible plant—anar, brinjal, castor, cotton, ginger, jute, lemon, maize, pumpkin, til, tobacco and many others—and if caterpillars were able to breed continuously, without any natural checks, they would overrun the earth and devour all vegetable matter. So we see that when one class of insect lives at the expense of another, the direct beneficiary is man. Butterflies, for all their beauty, are not our friends. But the unattractive ichneumon flies are the farmer’s allies. Not only do they destroy caterpillars, but also the grubs of beetles and the maggots of flies.
Butterfly Time
April showers
Bring swarms of butterflies
Streaming across the valley
Seeking sweet nectar.
Yellow, gold and burning bright,
Red and blue and banded white.
To my eyes they bring delight!
Theirs a long and arduous flight,
Here today and off tomorrow,
Floating on, bright butterflies,
To distant bowers.
For nature does things in good order:
And birds and butterflies recognize
No man-made border.
The Colour of Insects
The colour of an insect is important to its welfare. Though large numbers of insects have similar colour schemes, no two species have precisely the same form and colour.
The stick insects are so formed as to closely resemble their surroundings and so escape notice. Leaf insects are coloured like leaves, and may be green or dry. Many moths sit with expanded wings and their colour scheme blends so well with the bark on which they sit that they often escape notice. Grasshoppers, too, have protective colouring, some being of a dry-grass colour and others a green-grass colour. Grasshoppers that live in the fields have roughened backs, like lumps of soil.
An insect sometimes undergoes a change in its colour scheme when surroundings make this necessary. Thus, a young grasshopper that lives in green grass is green, but changes to the colour of dry-grass when the grass ripens and the insect becomes full grown. A caterpillar that sits on a leafy tree is green; but when it has to crawl down the trunk to reach the ground and pupate (change into an adult), it becomes brown, as the green would make it conspicuous against the bark of the tree. The changes may be very small or they may be very marked, and bear a close relation to the differing habits of the young and the old insect. Colour changes at each moult, or change of form, helping the insect to adapt to every change of surroundings.
On the other hand, we find some insects very vividly and brightly coloured, and these stand out clearly against their surroundings. These insects are usually distasteful to birds and predaceous insects, because of their taste, odour or the oils they excrete. Their colour scheme is protective inasmuch as it warns all enemies that they are unpleasant to eat! A young insect-eating bird will remember an unappetizing insect by its vivid colours, and will leave it alone at the next encounter.
There are many insects supposed to be warningly coloured: red, orange or yellow with black are common warning colours. Most bees and wasps, ladybird beetles, some blister beetles and some butterflies are so coloured. Dragonflies are often brilliant, with red, blue, yellow, green and other vivid colours combining with black. In fact, some insects, which are tasty, have copied the warning colours of the unpleasant insects, and so managed to survive! This is known as insect mimicry. Edible butterflies mimic nasty ones; moths mimic butterflies; flies mimic moths, bees or wasps.
It must not be thought that an insect can change its colour by itself. The colour of insects is fixed, and all of a species are coloured much alike; but it is believed that during the evolution of insects, they ‘adopted’ or gradually acquired different colour schemes, and that the warning-coloured insects arose first and the others later.
The leaf butterfly is an interesting example of deceptive colouring. The upper wings are brightly coloured. When it suddenly settles with wings folded, it exactly resembles a dead leaf. Even the grasshopper’s lower wings are often brilliant, but, when it settles with folded wings, its colours blend perfectly with the dry grass, making it extremely difficult for a bird to spot it.
Many butterflies have beautiful colouring, which does not fall into any of the above schemes. Some have distinctive marks on the tips of their wings. These are supposed to mislead any bird that attempts to seize them, the bird snatching at the bright spot on the wing and so missing the butterfly, which may lose a part of its wing but still escape alive.
A few insects have a colour scheme that is meant to terrify an enemy or frighten it away. Such are the hawk-moth caterpillars, which when alarmed suddenly expose large eye-like spots and look like ferocious snakes. Many caterpillars have such devices, coloured spots and stripes and waving hair tassels.
Self-preservation is not the only significant reason for an insect’s colour. Colours may also help in courtship and mating, as they do in the case of the higher animals, including man. Even from our own point of view, an insect gains in beauty from its colour. So why not from an insect’s point of view?
The Dragonfly
A bright, shimmering dragonfly is a beautiful thing, as it goes flitting over the water in summer sunshine, or sits motionless upon a twig with its wings extended and its great eyes gleaming like gold. But not all dragonflies are found near water; some prefer high, dry fields and others like the forest.
dragonflies were so named b
ecause of their large appetites and because they eat only living insects, which they pursue through the air. They capture their prey on the wing and feed upon almost all flying insects, especially gnats and mosquitoes. The larger dragonflies eat house flies, wasps and large butterflies.
Many dragonflies are superb fliers and can exceed even birds like swallows in speed and agility. They can alter the direction of their flight with perfect ease, and they seldom fail to capture their prey. Most of this insect’s life is spent on the wing. Because the legs are bunched far forward, they are unsuited for walking, and a dragonfly uses them only for clinging and climbing; but once on the wing, the dragonfly can attain a speed of nearly sixty miles an hour.
Like many birds and butterflies, some dragonflies migrate to warmer lands in the autumn, and great swarms have frequently been seen many miles out at sea.
dragonflies possess five eyes. Three are simple, and two are compound. The compound eyes are groups of tiny lenses. There are as many as 28,000 lenses in one eye, enabling the dragonfly to see farther and more clearly than most other insects. The upper lenses in the compound eye are larger and are probably used for flying in dim light or at dusk; the lower lenses are smaller and are probably used for flying in the daytime.
The mother dragonfly lays her eggs directly in the water or fastens them to water plants. The eggs hatch into ‘nymphs’ (baby dragonflies), which immediately swim off in search of something to eat. Dragonfly nymphs are the ogres of ponds and streams, for they will attack creatures twice their own size. Their jaws and legs are very strong. The nymph catches its prey by extending its lower lip forward; when it is not feeding, the long jaw folds up in front of its face. The dragonfly nymph is not particular about its food and will readily devour members of its own family.
The nymph usually moves by crawling, but it can swim by a curious method. Through the centre of the body runs a tube that ends in five tightly fitting valves. When the insect wants to swim, it fills the tube with water and then squirts out the contents forcibly. Thus jet-propelled, the whole body is sent shooting forward.