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I therefore determined that the plague should not alter my habits and amusements in any one respect. Though I came to this resolve from impulse, I think that I took the course which was in effect the most prudent, for the cheerfulness of spirits which I was thus enabled to retain discouraged the yellow-winged angel, and prevented him from taking a shot at me.
I will choose the larva of the Yellow-winged Sphex, which, with its convenient size, will furnish an easy object-lesson. The Hunting Wasps: chap. iv.
The hooting owl especially is a dangerous bird to attack under these circumstances. I was once trying to catch a yellow-winged woodpecker in its nest when my arm became twisted and lodged in the deep hole so that I could not get it out without the aid of a knife; but we were a long way from home and my only companion was a deaf mute cousin of mine.
Certain of them, indeed, lived only there, or at least it would have been extremely difficult to find them elsewhere; such was the famous Cerceris; such again, was the yellow-winged Sphex, that other wasp which so artistically stabs and paralyses the cricket, "the brown violinist of the clods."
Like the Yellow-winged Sphex, whom I have teased so often during her cellaring-operations, she is a narrow conservative, learning nothing and forgetting nothing. Let us leave her to do her work in peace. The Locust disappears underground and the egg is laid upon the breast of the paralysed insect. That is all: one carcase for each cell, no more.
All that I can affirm, judging by the invariable nature of the prey which one sees her dragging along, is that she must feed her larvae on the same non-adult Cricket that the Yellow-winged Sphex chooses for hers. Is she a poacher, a pillager of other's property, or a genuine huntress? My suspicions are persistent, though I know how chary a man should be of suspicions.
Among insects of the same species there is often neighbourship; but their labours are individual and not the result of co-operation. For instance, the Cricket-hunters, the Yellow-winged Sphex, settle in gangs at the foot of a sandstone cliff, but each digs her own burrow and would not suffer a neighbour to come and help in piercing the home.
The eastern yellow-winged laughing-thrush. This is perhaps the most common bird about Darjeeling. Parties hop about the roads picking up unconsidered trifles. The forehead is grey, as is much of the remaining plumage. The back of the head is bright chestnut. The throat is chestnut-brown. The wings are chestnut and bright yellow. Trochalopterum squamatum. The blue-winged laughing-thrush.
The Gitchie Manitou was wheeled out of the hangar for a thorough inspection. Then the boys climbed in and the engines were started. With a wave of the hand they were off. For a short time after the yellow-winged monoplane had mounted and turned south and westward over the vapory river, the boys had a new sensation. The rising fog started air currents which for a time they did not understand.
The majority of the insects which Fabre has studied are solitary, and are only to be encountered singly, scattered over wide areas of country. Some live only in determined spots, and not elsewhere, such as the famous Cerceris, or the yellow-winged Sphex, of which no trace is to be found beyond the limits of the Carpentras countryside.
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