COUNTRY LIFE
SEVERAL very odd incidents in natural history may be recorded from different parts of England. The strangest concerns a sparrowhawk and a
cat. The hawk descended again and again on a farmer's young chickens and after it had carried off a large number its ambition--of a very rare sort—increased. One day it attacked not the chickens, but one of two very young kittens that were in the habit of playing about among these late- hatched chickens. The mother was near-by, and as the hawk rose rather
slowly with its heavier burden jumped at the bird and pulled it down. A duel followed, for the hawk managed to use its beak on the hindquarters of the cat; but there could be only one end. The kitten was saved and the farmer, whose acres were a bracken-covered hillside in Wales, lost no more of his chickens. A second incident, also illustrative of a " nature red in tooth and claw," concerned a snake and a toad. The gardener, who watched the unlovely meal, killed the snake thinking for the moment that it was an adder ; but it turned out to be a mere grass snake, which is almost as harmless as the lizard, and generally known as a slow-worm, doubtless on the lucus a non principle, for it is neither slow nor a worm. A third incident is a further account of hornets—this year rather more numerous than wasps in some districts—attacking tortoise-shell butterflies on the wing and by the wing. A common enough occurrence, though it is not often watched, has astonished another gardener. He and his friends saw an unknown insect carrying caterpillars and at the end burying them in a vigorously dug grave on the lawn. The insect was doubtless one of the species of single wasps, which sting caterpillars with such anatomic skill that the victim is paralysed but remains alive and so " keeps good " till the eggs beside which it is placed hatch out and the young feed on the fresh food so provided.
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