ANIMAL DEPENDENCE ON WEATHER.
AMONTH of wet and darkness like that just past sensibly reduces the vitality of human beings and disposes them to sickness. How, then, do the animals, which have no protection from the weather, or a foot of dry soil on which to lie or stand, endure the continued damp and cold? The answer must be that they endure it how they can, but that of all conditions of weather, rain and damp are those most injurious to them. From the sheep in the sodden folds to the deer on the Highland hills, all suffer. Even the common and stupid remark that a wet day is " fine weather for young ducks" is wrong, for in the very wettest summers of the last ten years nearly all the young ducks died. Frost and snow, if only there be food, seldom injure any creatures but the small birds. Sheep will grow fat in a frost, even though the snow is lying unthawed on their thick, oil-soaked, non- conducting fleeces. Drought and dry heat always mean healthy seasons for all wild animals in this country, where food and water never fail. Cows, ponies, and deer put on more flesh from a pound's weight of dried-up grass than from two of water-logged pasture, and horses which can take a roll in a dust-bath after a day in the sun are in better condition than after careful grooming following a day's driving in mud and rain.
Considering the dislike of animals for rain and its injury to their health, it is curious that more have not learned to build " houses " of some kind. Besides the squirrels and the dormice, the orang-outang is the one mammal which makes a shelter from the weather, and that a poor one. It is only their magnificent condition of health, due to their being all teetotalers and having to work for their living, that enables most land animals and birds to stand continuous wet. Pos- sibly the tropical winter rains of the central zones are less injurious to life than the cold rains and low temperature of temperate countries. In the Indian plains spring is dusty and barren. The sun brings heat, but only a life in death, for there is no water in the ground. The monsoon, when the Indian sky is filled with welcome clouds, brings freshness and life. The opening of the rains is the real beginning of spring. The plants grow so fast that you can almost see them, forced by the hot, almost fermenting earth. There is a prodigious birth of insects, followed by the destroying hosts of the carnivorous insects which feed upon them. " Eha," the Indian field naturalist, considers that the first few days of the rains are the Indian counterpart of our opening spring days, so far as anything in England can find a parallel there. "Even the roadside rivulets are full of little fishes, come from I know not where, to grow fat on the worms and mole crickets borne helplessly along by the flood, and the fireflies light their lamps and hold their silent concerts, the occupants of each tree flashing in unison and making sheet lightning in the woods." The rain cannot put out the fireflies' lamps ; but after a few days of this inter- mittent downpour it is evident that the animals begin to feel the effects of cold and damp, even in India. All creatures, from men to the white ants, begin in some way to show that it inconveniences them. " The fear of getting wet is uni- versal. The gentleman runs because the rain will spoil his clothes. The coolie runs because he has none. When you realise that at this time all kinds of birds and beasts, down to the flimsy butterflies and moths, live and sleep in the open air you cannot help wondering how they manage when the station rain-gauge is registering ten inches in twenty-four hours." The modes and places of butterflies' beds have been before this set out in the Spectator. But the sufferings of the Indian birds, many of which lay their eggs during the first and heaviest month of the rains, and of the monkeys, huddled together with the water spouting from their long tails," when the deluge is running so fast down branches and trunks that the water may be seen throbbing as it slips down the bark in a thick glaze, must be great. Evidence of the danger to young animal life at this time is seen in the season at which the young of the Indian deer are born. In every country the females of all wild animals have adjusted the time at which they produce their young to the seasons. It will be found in every case that the mammals, more especially the larger grass-eating kinds, drop their fawns, calves, and kids at the time when natural food is beginning to increase, and when the bad weather is over. In temperate Europe these two periods are the same. Winter is over and food steadily in- creasing in early summer, and that is the time at which the doe and hind produce their young. If the rains, which cer- tainly cause an enormous increase of vegetable food in India, were also favourable to health, we should expect the Axis kinds, for example, the typical jungle-deer of the peninsula, to drop their fawns in April or May. But they do not. The fawns are not produced till after the rainy season, in October. There is no stronger proof than this that the rains, even of the tropics, are hurtful to animal life. When these creatures are partly domesticated or naturalised, the females begin either to disregard this seasonal law, or, if living at large, to change the period of producing young to suit the new seasons and climate. But though the first and imperious instinct of preserving the young dictates these physical adaptations, in the ordinary matters of life they often do not learn to accommodate themselves to new conditions. The Sambu stags which Lord Powerscourt turned out in his glens and woods on the Wicklow Mountains persisted in lying in the thickest cover all day, trying to shelter from the Indian sun, though the trees were dripping with Irish rains and mist. Yet domesticated sheep will always go to the top of a hill to sleep at nights in the dry. In Dovedale the flocks climb in the evening literally to the summit of Thorp Cloud, and mark the skyline like a string of black beads against the setting sun.
The writer has no experience of the wild life of the parts of Lance,shire round Manchester, one of the wettest areas of England, where, as Yorkshiremen say, there is no spring and no summer, but " all back-end,"—i.e., autumn. But if rain is the main climatic enemy of animals in these latitudes, we should expect to find Ireland, the wettest of the three islands, and the west coast of Scotland, less populous in species and numbers of birds and beasts than the east coast of Scotland or Norfolk. And that is the case. The place of Ireland in the Atlantic and its severance from what was Con- tinental England may account for the absence of some species. But climate must be held mainly accountable for the failure of introduced animals, such as the brown hare and perhaps the black grouse, to multiply, for the poor crop of partridges, and for the scarcity of birds like the red grouse, for which the heathery mountains would seem well suited. Speaking gener- ally, Irish woods and mountains are curiously bare of indigenous life, though the migratory woodcock, and in the bogs the migratory wildfowl, find it a congenial winter resort. In the same way the mainland of the wet Scotch west coast has a smaller bird population than the east.
In this country wet springs and summers seem to affect most forms of animal life. There are very few butterflies or moths. All young ground birds suffer, especially game. Rabbits and hares die of fluke and dysentery; calves, sheep, and lambs of various ailments. Myriads of wild birds' eggs are addled, or the young birds die in the nests. Even rats decrease. Fish do not thrive, because there are few insects. Even kingfishers decrease on the Thames, because the wet soaks into the holes in which they breed. There is reason to conjecture that a wet summer round our coasts actually reduces the number of fish in the sea, and of marine life generally. This may seem a paradox, but it is borne out partly by the increase of marine life after dry years, partly by the recent discoveries as to the hatching and life of the spawn and young of sea creatures. The season of the year 1900, for instance, has seen the most teeming marine life known for years round our shores. 'But the early summer of 1900 was exceptionally wet and cold ? ' Yes, so it was, and it destroyed the young partridges, rabbits, and hares. But the sea creatures are not made in one summer like the partridges. The herrings, of which the record catch was made, the bass which were caught in thousands off Dover, the innumerable cuttlefish off the coasts of France and Cornwall, the solid shoals of mackerel taken off the Irish shores, perhaps were adult fish hatched and bred in unusual numbers in the three previous hot summers, when no cold rains were chilling the surface of the sea and keeping down temperature. For it is on the surface of the sea that the untold millions of the eggs of most of the food-fish float, and it is there, too, that the minute creatures swim and breed, and lay their invisible eggs on which the fry of the sea-fish feed. Thus rain and cold may be as fatal to the life of the ocean as they are to life on the dry land. They chill the surface water, on which float the embryoes both of fish and the food which ought to support them. Wet weather spoils even the harvest of the sea.
Previous page
