UNDERGROUND LARDERS

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 47, 18 May 1927, Page 14

UNDERGROUND LARDERS

One of the surest evidences of wisdom in the animal kingdom is the way many of its little inhabitants prepare for a rainy day. They store up food to keep it for hard times. A fox, when he plunders a hen-roost undisturbed, will hide what he cannot eat immediately, and save it for the future; and a dog recalls his wild past when he carries a superfluous bone and buries it in a little pit of his own making. Among* animals less exalted than the fox and the dog we find more elaborate ways of meeting hard times. The squirrel, with his hidden nuts and acorns, snoozes down in his winter nest, assured of a food supply whenever hunger or cold calls him from slumber; and for all his merry summer pranks he is the best British example of thrifty providence. Abroad, where strange rodents teem, we find still higher examples of this instinct, perhaps the most wonderful of all instincts in animals.

Spreading from Hungary into Asia there is a field rat known as the hamster, a little animal with a prodigious sense of the future. It goes in to the harvest fields, cuts down corn with its sharp teeth, takes the grain from the husk by manipulating it with its paws, and carries it away to underground barns. A single rat will store a bushel of grain and men break open these subterranean granaries in winter and live on the stores collected by these industrious but destructive little animals.

Another storehouse to which hungry people go in winter is the subterranean warehouse of one of the voles. This little animal is as great a wonder in its ways as the hamster. Its food consists of highly nutritious roots. When time and the roots are ripe the vole scratches the earth from the root and scrunulously cleanses it. Then it bites off the top of the plant and with its sharp teeth gnaws the root into slices. These it carries away, with incredible industry, down its burrow into beautifully constructed chambers. Its labour knows no cessation until a store of between twenty and thirty pounds of this rich, nutritious food has been laid up.

Not less industrious are the Alpine marmots. They were most probably the first of haymakers. They cut their grass, convert it into hay and take it underground into the snuggest little barns imaginable; and when they wake during the distressful winter season there is their supply, abundant and ready for use, in the room next door. Anyone who knows the story of insects and its incredible marvels will be prepared to hear that the tiny things of life eclipse the big ones in food storing. The harvesting ant, outdistances even man himself, doing things that we cannot. This insect collects various seeds and carries them into its warm and moist little barns below. The seed in these conditions ought at once to sprout, but the ant in some mysterious way prevents it from doing so. Growth is arrested for weeks without injury to the seeds, but in due course the seed is allowed to grow into a tiny plant.

Now, in order that the plant may obtain food the starch- and albumen in the seed must be converted into sugar. The ant allows growth to continue until that change has been effected. Then he bites off the root and the stalk, carries up the now thoroughly sweetened seed into the sunlight, dries it, and returns it to its barn a mass of sugary flour, the winter food of the ant.

That is surely something to give mankind pause. But there is another food-hoarder, the parasol ant, which bites off fragments of leaves as big as sixpences and carries them down into its chambered nests. What the ants do to the leaves we do not know, but it is proved beyond doubt that the bitten leaves, kept at the right degree of humidity by the ants, serve as beds on which they grow fungi for food.

Discretion is the salt and fancy, the sugar of life; the one preserves, the other sweetens it.

Happiness grows at our own fireside and is not to be picked in strangers’ gardens.