Poisonous snakes carry their poison in a small bag inside their mouths. They usually have two fangs or long pointed teeth, which are on a kind of hinge. The fangs lie flat along the snake’s gums till he gets angry and wants to kill something, then they stand on end, and he dives his head forward and strikes them into his enemy. As he does so, the poison passes out of the poison bag, or gland, into the two holes in your skin made by the fangs. This poison then gets into the veins of the man who has been bitten and is carried by the blood all over the body in a few seconds, unless steps are at once taken to stop it by binding the veins up and sucking the wound. Snake poison does no harm when swallowed.
Insects
Insects are very interesting animals to collect, or to watch, or to photograph.
Also for a Scout who fishes, or studies birds or reptiles, it is most important that he should know a certain amount about the insects which are their favourite food at different times of the year or different hours of the day.
About bees alone whole books have been written—for they have wonderful powers in making their honeycomb, in finding their way for miles, sometimes as far as six miles, to find the right kind of flowers for giving them the sugary juice for making honey, and getting back with it to the hive. They are quite a model community, for they respect their queen and kill those who won’t work.
Then some insects are useful as food. Locusts—a big kind of grasshopper—are eaten in India and South Africa. We were very glad to get a flight or two of them over Mafeking. When they settled on the ground we beat them down, with empty sacks, as they turned to rise. They were then dried in the sun and pounded up and eaten. And make a substitute for salt.
Ants as Life Savers
I have known another case of ants being useful—in fact they were not only useful but saved the lives of several men.
These men were a party of scientific professors who were hiking in the wilds of Australia, searching for rare plants and animals, reptiles and bugs.
Out in the desert they ran out of water. For hours they struggled on, maddened with thirst and weak with exhaustion. It looked as though, like many explorers before them, they would collapse and die. Luckily, to their great relief, a small native girl appeared. They made a sign to her that they were dying of thirst and wanted her to go and fetch water.
In reply she pointed to a string of ants which were climbing up a baobab tree. (This tree has a great fat hollow trunk which thus forms a sort of water tank.)
The little girl picked a long stalk of dried grass and climbed up to a little hole in the trunk which the ants were running into.
She put one end of the straw down this hole and the other end into her mouth and sucked up water.
A small native girl came to the aid of the scientific professors who ran out of water when hiking in the wilds of Australia.
In this way the wild little imp of the desert taught the learned gentlemen a valuable bit of knowledge which with all their school and college education they did not possess.
I hope that had a Scout been with them he would have been wise to the idea, or at any rate would have used his eyes and wits and would have noticed the ants at their work and guessed why they were using that hole in the tree.
Watching Insects
It doesn’t sound very exciting to watch insects, but the great French naturalist, Henri Fabre, the son of peasants, spent days in studying the lives and habits of insects, and found out all kinds of curious things about them. He became world famous for his studies. Some insects are our friends—such as the silkworm and the ladybird or “ladybug”—but others are our enemies: They destroy vegetables and attack flowers. You all know how the mosquito spreads such dangerous diseases as malaria and yellow fever. And I need not remind you of how the house-fly can carry disease germs—that is why, in camp as well as at home, all food should be kept carefully covered, and no dirt or rubbis h be allowed to lie about.
PATROL PRACTICES IN ANIMAL OBSERVATION
In the country, send out the Scouts to find out by observation, and to report on such points as these:
How does a wild rabbit dig its hole? When a lot of rabbits are alarmed, does a rabbit merely run because the others do, or does he look around to see what is the danger before he goes?
Does a woodpecker break the bark away to get at insects on a tree trunk, or does he pick them out of holes, or how does he gets at them?
Does a trout when disturbed by people passing along the bank go up or down stream? Does he go away altogether or return to his place?
If in a large town, take the Scouts to the Zoological Garden or to the Natural History Museum. About half a dozen animals would be quite enough to study for one day.
Find out all about your Patrol animal. Learn its call. Discover its haunts, its tracks and habits. If it is not a local animal, study it in a museum or zoo.
Get each Patrol to keep an outdoors log for a month, then compare results. Each Scout should contribute something to the log, such as a note of something seen or a sketch of a bird or animal. Or have a nature scrap book, with cuttings from newspapers and magazines of nature photographs, notes on outdoor life, nature calendars, etc.
Encourage the taking of photographs. Even the cheapest camera can be used for showing the surroundings in which each kind of bird makes its nest.
Bird-feeding can be practised both in town and country, particularly in the winter. A window-sill feeding-tray in town can attract many different birds. The provision of water in summer is also important.
