Books: Moths of the Limberlost
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Gene Stratton Porter >> Moths of the Limberlost
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Gloveri could not be told from Cecropiain half-tone reproduction by
any save a scientist, so similar are the markings, but in colour
they are vastly different, and more beautiful. The only living
Gloveri I ever secured was almost done with life, and she was so
badly battered I could not think of making a picture of her. The
wings are a lovely red wine colour, with warm tan borders, and the
crescents are white, with a line of tan and then of black. The
abdomen is white striped with wine and black.
Cynthia has pale olive green shadings on both male and female.
These are imported moths brought here about 1861 in the hope that
they would prove valuable in silk culture. They occur mostly
where the ailanthus grows.
My heart goes out to Cecropia because it is such a noble,
birdlike, big fellow, and since it has decided to be rare with me
no longer, all that is necessary is to pick it up, either in
caterpillar, cocoon, or moth, at any season of the year, in almost
any location. The Cecropia moth resembles the robin among birds;
not alone because he is grey with red markings, but also he haunts
the same localities. The robin is the bird of the eaves, the back
door, the yard and orchard. Cecropia is the moth. My doorstep is
not the only one they grace; my friends have found them in like
places. Cecropia cocoons are attached to fences, chicken-coops,
barns, houses, and all through the orchards of old country places,
so that their emergence at bloom time adds to May and June one more
beauty, and frequently I speak of them as the Robin Moth.
In connexion with Cecropia there came to me the most delightful
experience of my life. One perfect night during the middle of
May, all the world white with tree bloom, touched to radiance with
brilliant moonlight; intoxicating with countless blending perfumes,
I placed a female Cecropia on the screen of my sleeping-room door
and retired. The lot on which the Cabin stands is sloping, so that,
although the front foundations are low, my door is at least five feet
above the ground, and opens on a circular porch, from which steps
lead down between two apple trees, at that time sheeted in bloom.
Past midnight I was awakened by soft touches on the screen, faint
pullings at the wire. I went to the door and found the porch,
orchard, and night-sky alive with Cecropias holding high carnival.
I had not supposed there were so many in all this world. From
every direction they came floating like birds down the moonbeams.
I carefully removed the female from the door to a window close
beside, and stepped on the porch. No doubt I was permeated with
the odour of the moth. As I advanced to the top step, that lay
even with the middle branches of the apple trees, the exquisite big
creatures came swarming around me. I could feel them on my hair,
my shoulders, and see them settling on my gown and outstretched
hands.
Far as I could penetrate the night-sky more were coming. They
settled on the bloom-laden branches, on the porch pillars, on me
indiscriminately. I stepped inside the door with one on each hand
and five clinging to my gown. This experience, I am sure, suggested
Mrs. Comstock's moth hunting in the Limberlost. Then I went back
to the veranda and revelled with the moths until dawn drove them
to shelter. One magnificent specimen, birdlike above all the others,
I followed across the orchard and yard to a grape arbour, where I
picked him from the under side of a leaf after he had settled for
the coming day. Repeatedly I counted close to a hundred, and then
they would so confuse me by flight I could not be sure I was not
numbering the same one twice. With eight males, some of them fine
large moths, one superb, from which to choose, my female mated with
an insistent, frowsy little scrub lacking two feet and having torn
and ragged wings. I needed no surer proof that she had very dim
vision.
CHAPTER IV The Yellow Emperor: Eacles Imperialis
Several years ago, Mr. A. Eisen, a German, of Coldwater, Michigan,
who devotes his leisure to collecting moths, gave me as pinned
specimens a pair of Eacles Imperialis, and their full life history.
Any intimate friend of mine can testify that yellow is my favourite
colour, with shades of lavender running into purple, second choice.
When I found a yellow moth, liberally decorated with lavender, the
combination was irresistible. Mr. Eisen said the mounted specimens
were faded; but the living moths were beautiful beyond description.
Naturally I coveted life.
I was very particular to secure the history of the caterpillars
and their favourite foods. I learned from Mr. Eisen that they
were all of the same shape and habit, but some of them might be
green, with cream-coloured heads and feet, and black face lines,
the body covered sparsely with long hairs; or they might be brown,
with markings of darker brown and black with white hairs; but they
would be at least three inches long when full grown, and would have
a queer habit of rearing and drawing leaves to their mouths when feeding.
I was told I would find them in August, on leaves of spruce, pine,
cherry, birch, alder, sycamore, elm, or maple; that they pupated in
the ground; and the moths were common, especially around lights in city
parks, and at street crossings.
Coming from a drive one rare June evening, I found Mr. William
Pettis, a shooter of oil wells, whom I frequently met while at my
work, sitting on the veranda in an animated business discussion
with the Deacon.
"I brought you a pair of big moths that I found this morning on
some bushes beside the road," said Mr. Pettis. "I went to give
Mr. Porter a peep to see if he thought you'd want them, and they
both got away. He was quicker than I, and caught the larger one,
but mine sailed over the top of that tree." He indicated an elm
not far away.
"Did you know them?" I asked the Deacon.
"No," he answered. "You have none of the kind. They are big as
birds and a beautiful yellow.'
"Yellow!" No doubt I was unduly emphatic. "Yellow! Didn't you
know better than to open a box with moths in it outdoors at night?"
"It was my fault," interposed Mr. Pettis. "He told me not to
open the box, but I had shown them a dozen times to-day and they
never moved. I didn't think about night being their time to fly.
I am very sorry."
So was I. Sorry enough to have cried, but I tried my best to
conceal it. Anyway, it might be Io, and I had that. On going
inside to examine the moth, I found a large female Eacles
Imperialis, with not a scale of down misplaced. Even by gas light
I could see that the yellow of the living moth was a warm canary
colour, and the lavender of the mounted specimen closer heliotrope
on the living, for there were pinkish tints that had faded from the
pinned moth.
She was heavy with eggs, and made no attempt to fly, so I closed
the box and left her until the lights were out, and then removed the
lid. Every opening was tightly screened, and as she had mated, I did
not think she would fly. I hoped in the freedom of the Cabin she
would not break her wings, and ruin herself for a study.
There was much comfort in the thought that I could secure her
likeness; her eggs would be fertile, and I could raise a brood
the coming season, in which would be both male and female. When
life was over I could add her to my specimen case, for these are
of the moths that do not eat, and live only a few days after
depositing their eggs. So I went out and explained to Mr. Pettis
what efforts I had made to secure this yellow moth, comforted him
for allowing the male to escape by telling him I could raise all I
wanted from the eggs of the female, showed him my entire collection,
and sent him from the Cabin such a friend to my work, that it was he
who brought me an oil-coated lark a few days later.
On rising early the next morning, I found my moth had deposited
some eggs on the dining-room floor, before the conservatory doors,
more on the heavy tapestry that covered them, and she was clinging
to a velvet curtain at a library window, liberally dotting it with
eggs, almost as yellow as her body. I turned a tumbler over those
on the floor, pinned folds in the curtains, and as soon as the light
was good, set up a camera and focused on a suitable location.
She climbed on my finger when it was held before her, and was carried,
with no effort to fly, to the place I had selected, though Molly-Cotton
walked close with a spread net, ready for the slightest impulse toward
movement. But female moths seldom fly until they have finished egg
depositing, and this one was transferred with no trouble to the spot
on which I had focused. On the back wall of the Cabin, among some
wild roses, she was placed on a log, and immediately raised her wings,
and started for the shade of the vines. The picture made of her as
she walked is beautiful. After I had secured several studies she was
returned to the library curtain, where she resumed egg placing.
These were not counted, but there, were at least three hundred at a
rough guess.
I had thought her lovely in gas light, but day brought forth marvels
and wonders. When a child, I used to gather cowslips in a bed of
lush swale, beside a little creek at the foot of a big hill on our farm.
At the summit was an old orchard, and in a brush-heap a brown thrush
nested. From a red winter pearmain the singer poured out his own heart
in song, and then reproduced the love ecstasy of every other bird of
the orchard. That moth's wings were so exactly the warm though
delicate yellow of the flowers I loved, that as I looked at it I could
feel my bare feet sinking in the damp ooze, smell the fragrance of the
buttercups, and hear again the ripple of the water and the mating
exultation of the brown thrush.
In the name--Eacles Imperialis--there is no meaning or appropriateness
to "Eacles"; "Imperialis"--of course, translates imperial--which seems
most fitting, for the moth is close the size of Cecropia, and of truly
royal beauty. We called it the Yellow Emperor. Her Imperial Golden
Majesty had a wing sweep of six and a quarter inches. From the
shoulders spreading in an irregular patch over front and back wings,
most on the front, were markings of heliotrope, quite dark in colour:
Near the costa of the front wings were two almost circular dots of
slightly paler heliotrope, the one nearest the edge about half the size
of the other. On the back wings, halfway from each edge, and half an
inch from the marking at the base, was one round spot of the same colour.
Beginning at the apex of the front pair, and running to half an inch
from the lower edge, was a band of escalloped heliotrope. On the
back pair this band began half an inch from the edge and ran straight
across, so that at the outer curve of the wing it was an inch higher.
The front wing surface and the space above this marking on the back
were liberally sprinkled with little oblong touches of heliotrope;
but from the curved line to the bases of the back pair, the colouring
was pure canary yellow.
The top of the head was covered with long, silken hairs of heliotrope,
then a band of yellow; the upper abdomen was strongly shaded with
heliotrope almost to the extreme tip. The lower sides of the wings
were yellow at the base, the spots showing through, but not the
bands, and only the faintest touches of the mottling. The thorax
and abdomen were yellow, and the legs heliotrope. The antennae
were heliotrope, fine, threadlike, and closely pressed to the head.
The eyes were smaller than those of Cecropia, and very close together.
Compared with Cecropia these moths were very easy to paint. Their
markings were elaborate, but they could be followed accurately,
and the ground work of colour was warm cowslip yellow. The only
difficulty was to make the almost threadlike antennae show,
and to blend the faint touches of heliotrope on the upper wings
with the yellow.
The eggs on the floor and curtains were guarded with care. They
were dotted around promiscuously, and at first were clear and of
amber colour, but as the little caterpillars grew in them, they
showed a red line three fourths of the way around the rim, and
became slightly depressed in the middle. The young emerged in
thirteen days. They were nearly half an inch long, and were
yellow with black lines. They began the task of eating until
they reached the pupa state, by turning on their shells and
devouring all of them to the glue by which they were fastened.
They were given their choice of oak, alder, sumac, elm, cherry,
and hickory. The majority of them seemed to prefer the hickory.
They moulted on the fifth day for the first time, and changed to
a brown colour. Every five or six days they repeated the process,
growing larger and of stronger colour with each moult, and developing
a covering of long white hairs. Part of these moulted four times,
others five.
At past six weeks of age they were exactly as Mr. Eisen had described
them to me. Those I kept in confinement pupated on a bed of baked
gravel, in a tin bucket. It is imperative to bake any earth or sand
used for them to kill pests invisible to the eye, that might bore into
the pupa cases and destroy the moths.
I watched the transformation with intense interest. After the
caterpillars had finished eating they travelled in search of a
place to burrow for a day or two. Then they gave up, and lay
quietly on the sand. The colour darkened hourly, the feet and
claspers seemed to draw inside, and one morning on going to look
there were some greenish brown pupae. They shone as if freshly
varnished, as indeed they were, for the substance provided to
facilitate the emergence of the pupae from the caterpillar skins
dries in a coating, that helps to harden the cases and protect them.
These pupae had burst the skins at the thorax, and escaped by
working the abdomen until they lay an inch or so from the skins.
What a "cast off garment" those skins were! Only the frailest
outside covering, complete in all parts, and rapidly turning to
a dirty brown. The pupae were laid away in a large box having a
glass lid. It was filled with baked sand, covered with sphagnum
moss, slightly dampened occasionally, and placed where it was
cool, but never at actual freezing point. The following spring
after the delight of seeing them emerge, they were released, for
I secured a male to complete my collection a few days later, and
only grew the caterpillars to prove it possible.
There was a carnival in the village, and, for three nights the
streets were illuminated brightly from end to end, to the height
of Ferris wheels and diving towers. The lights must have shone
against the sky for miles around, for they drew from the Limberlost,
from the Canoper, from Rainbow Bottom, and the Valley of the Wood Robin,
their winged creatures of night.
I know Emperors appear in these places in my locality, for the
caterpillars feed on leaves found there, and enter the ground to
pupate; so of course the moth of June begins its life in the same
location. Mr. Pettis found the mated pair he brought to me, on a
bush at the edge of a swamp. They also emerge in cities under any
tree on which their caterpillars feed. Once late in May, in the
corner of a lichen-covered, old snake fence beside the Wabash on
the Shimp farm, I made a series of studies of the home life of a pair
of ground sparrows. They had chosen for a location a slight
depression covered with a rank growth of meadow grass. Overhead
wild plum and thorn in full bloom lay white-sheeted against the
blue sky; red bud spread its purple haze, and at a curve, the
breast of the river gleamed white as ever woman's; while underfoot
the grass was obscured with masses of wild flowers.
An unusually fine cluster of white violets attracted me as I
worked around the birds, so on packing at the close of the day I
lifted the plant to carry home for my wild flower bed. Below a
few inches of rotting leaves and black mould I found a lively
pupa of the Yellow Emperor.
So these moths emerge and deposit their eggs in the swamps,
forests, beside the river and wherever the trees on which they
feed grow. When the serious business of life is over, attracted by
strong lights, they go with other pleasure seeking company, and
grace society by their royal presence.
I could have had half a dozen fine Imperialis moths during the
three nights of the carnival, and fluttering above buildings many
more could be seen that did not descend to our reach. Raymond had
such a busy time capturing moths he missed most of the joys of
the carnival, but I truly think he liked the chase better. One he
brought me, a female, was so especially large that I took her to
the Cabin to be measured, and found her to be six and three quarter
inches, and of the lightest yellow of any specimen I have seen.
Her wings were quite ragged. I imagined she had finished laying
her eggs, and was nearing the end of life, hence she was not so
brilliant as a newly emerged specimen. The moth proved this
theory correct by soon going out naturally.
Choice could be made in all that plethora, and a male and female of
most perfect colouring and markings were selected, for my studies of
a pair. One male was mounted and a very large female on account of
her size. That completed my Imperialis records from eggs to
caterpillars, pupae and moths.
The necessity for a book on this subject; made simple to the
understanding, and attractive to the eye of the masses, never was
so deeply impressed upon me as in an experience with Imperialis.
Molly-Cotton was attending a house-party, and her host had chartered
a pavilion at a city park for a summer night dance. At the close of
one of the numbers; over the heads of the laughing crowd, there swept
toward the light a large yellow moth.
With one dexterous sweep the host caught it, and while the dancers
crowded around him with exclamations of wonder and delight, he
presented it to Molly-Cotton and asked, "Do you know what it is?"
She laughingly answered, "Yes. But you don't!"
" Guilty!" he responded. "Name it."
For one fleeting instant Molly-Cotton measured the company. There
was no one present who was not the graduate of a commissioned high
school. There were girls who were students at The Castle, Smith,
Vassar, and Bryn Mawr. The host was a Cornell junior, and there
were men from Harvard and Yale.
"It is an Eacles Imperialis Io Polyphemus Cecropia Regalis," she
said. Then in breathless suspense she waited.
"Shades of Homer!" cried the host. "Where did you learn it?"
"They are flying all through the Cabin at home," she replied.
"There was a tumbler turned over their eggs on the dining-room floor,
and you dared not sit on the right side of the library window seat
because of them when I left."
"What do you want with their eggs?" asked a girl.
"Want to hatch their caterpillars, and raise them until they transform
into these moths," answered poor Molly-Cotton, who had been taught
to fear so few living things that at the age of four she had carried
a garter snake into the house for a playmate.
"Caterpillars!" The chorus arose to a shriek. "Don't they sting you?
Don't they bite you?"
"No, they don't!" replied Molly-Cotton. "They don't bite anything
except leaves; they are fine big fellows; their colouring is exquisite;
and they evolve these beautiful moths. I invite all of you to visit
us, and see for yourselves how intensely interesting they are."
There was a murmur of polite thanks from the girls, but one man
measured Molly-Cotton from the top curl of her head to the tip of
her slippers, and answered, " I accept the invitation. When may
I come?" He came, and left as great a moth enthusiast as any of
us. This incident will be recognized as furnishing the basis on
which to build the ballroom scene in "A Girl of the Limberlost*",
in which Philip and Edith quarrel over the capture of a yellow
Emperor. But what of these students from the great representative
colleges of the United States, to whom a jumbled string made from
the names, of half a dozen moths answered for one of the commonest
of all?
<<*April 1994 [limbr10x.xxx] 125 A Girl of the Limberlost, by Gene
Stratton-Porter>>
CHAPTER V The Lady Bird: Deilephila Lineata
In that same country garden where my first Cecropia was found,
Deilephila Lineata was one of my earliest recollections. This moth
flew among the flowers of especial sweetness all day long, just as
did the hummingbirds; and I was taught that it was a bird also--the
Lady Bird. The little tan and grey thing hovering in air before the
flowers was almost as large as the humming-birds, sipping honey as
they did, swift in flight as they; and both my parents thought
it a bird.
They did not know the humming-birds were feasting on small insects
attracted by the sweets, quite as often as on honey, for they never
had examined closely. They had been taught, as I was, that this
other constant visitor to the flowers was a bird. When a child,
a humming-bird nested in a honeysuckle climbing over my mother's
bedroom window. My father lifted me, with his handkerchief bound
across my nose, on the supposition that the bird was so delicate
it would desert its nest and eggs if they were breathed upon, to
see the tiny cup of lichens, with a brown finish so fine it resembled
the lining of a chestnut burr, and two tiny eggs. I well remember
he told me that I now had seen the nest and eggs of the smallest
feathered creature except the Lady Bird, and he never had found
its cradle himself.
Every summer I discovered nests by the dozen, and for several
years a systematic search was made for the home of a Lady Bird.
One of the unfailing methods of finding locations was to climb a
large Bartlett pear tree that stood beside the garden fence, and
from an overhanging bough watch where birds flew with bugs and
worms they collected. Lady Birds were spied upon, but when they
left our garden they arose high in air, and went straight from
sight toward every direction. So locating their nests as those
of other birds were found, seemed impossible.
Then I tried going close the sweetest flowers, those oftenest
visited, the petunias, yellow day lilies, and trumpet creepers,
and sitting so immovably I was not noticeable while I made a study
of the Lady Birds. My first discovery was that they had no tail.
One poised near enough to make sure of that, and I hurried to my
father with the startling news. He said it was nothing remarkable;
birds frequently lost their tails. He explained how a bird in close
quarters has power to relax its muscles, and let its tail go in
order to save its body, when under the paw of a cat, or caught in a
trap.
That was satisfactory, but I thought it must have been a spry cat
to get even a paw on the Lady Bird, for frequently humming-birds
could be seen perching, but never one of these. I watched the tail
question sharply, and soon learned the cats had been after every
Lady Bird that visited our garden, or any of our neighbours, for not
one of them had a tail. When this information was carried my father,
he became serious, but finally he said perhaps the tail was very short;
those of humming-birds or wrens were, and apparently some water birds
had no tail, or at least a very short one.
That seemed plausible, but still I watched this small and most
interesting bird of all; this bird that no one ever had seen taking
a bath, or perching, and whose nest never had been found by a person
so familiar with all outdoors as my father. Then came a second
discovery: it could curl its beak in a little coil when leaving a flower.
A few days later I saw distinctly that it had four wings but I could
discover no feet. I became a rank doubter, and when these convincing
proofs were carried to my father, he also grew dubious.
"I always have thought and been taught that it was a bird," he said,
"but you see so clearly and report so accurately, you almost convince
me it is some large insect possibly of the moth family."
When I carried this opinion to my mother and told her, no doubt
pompously, that `very possibly' I had discovered that the Lady
Bird was not a bird at all, she hailed it as high treason, and
said, "Of course it is a bird!" That forced me to action. The
desperate course of capturing one was resolved upon. If only I
could, surely its feet, legs, and wings would tell if it were a
bird. By the hour I slipped among those bloom-bordered walks
between the beds of flaming sweet-williams, buttercups, phlox,
tiger and day lilies, Job's tears, hollyhocks, petunias, poppies,
mignonette, and every dear old-fashioned flower that grows, and
followed around the flower-edged beds of lettuce, radishes,
and small vegetables, relentlessly trailing Lady Birds.
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