Book Description

Excerpt from The Entomologist's Record and Journal of Variation, Vol. 21: January to December, 1909 The morning of August, 5th, 1908, broke doubtfully at Davos; large heavy clouds hang over the valley, whilst others collected round the highest peaks and presaged rain. However, the sun shone brightly between the cloudy intervals, and a start was made for the Sertig-Thal. Across the valley to Claradel, where more "baths" and "open-air beds" are to be found, and one finds oneself in the Sertig-Thal. This is a much narrower valley than the Dischma-Thal, but almost as highly cultivated, although, as it ascends more steeply, the cultivated patches are more quickly left behind. It was, however, a most unusual sight to me to see them busily feeding on the flowers of wild thyme. On the little wild-thyme patches by the edges of the meadows or on the top of the stone-walls, they collected, resting on the flowers with extended and quivering wings, their probosces dug deep into the nectaries of the florets, ever changing their position as they fluttered round a thyme head, successively probing each floret in turn, and then passing on to another, their white-tipped black wings continually vibrating up and down and looking very fresh and fine in the sunlight, and their antennae extended in front; but they remained when the sun was hidden; on two or three occasions also examples were noticed on the horse-droppings in the road, from which they seemed to be extracting some moisture. Argyunis aglaia and A. niobe flew joyously up and down the slopes, whilst, on every small piece of waste ground, Adkinia coprodactyla was, as in all these neighbouring valleys, readily disturbed. A few examples of Aricia astrarche and Polyommatus icarus were also noticed, whilst Melampias melampus flew almost everywhere, nor was there any diminution in the abundance of Pieris brassicae, which, in all the valleys of this part of the Grisons this year, amounted to a veritable plague. Hundreds were often in view at one time, half-a-dozen always, even when cloudy or rain was slightly falling. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."