Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III EXPOSED AND CONCEALED ANIMALS (PHANEROZOA AND CRYPTOZOA) Phanerozoic or diurnal animals are positively heliotropic; cryptozoic animals including crepuscular, nocturnal, and subterranean forms, in fact all that avoid the light of day, are negatively heliotropic. Flights of butterflies at high noon are followed by swarms of hawk-moths and noctuids at twilight. The contrast is particularly well illustrated on a broad and spectacular scale by the interchange of amenities between such gregarious creatures as crows and the so-called flying foxes or fruit-eating bats, due to their homing in the same place, as may be observed daily in certain favourable localities in the maritime districts of Ceylon. I recorded these facts in
Spolia Zeylanica, after mentioning them in a letter to the late Professor Alfred Newton who expressed his appreciation of them. These animals keep remarkably regular hours of work and sleep, the birds foraging by day, the bats by night. At one place in particular, a small lighthouse islet off the south-west coast named Barberyn, which is covered by a coconut plantation, they congregate in the palm trees alternately by night and by day. If one crosses over to the island in the heat of the day all is quiet and nothing out of the common is to be noted; but about the time of sunset a great commotion of crowsl among the tree tops bursts upon the ear, and gradually subsides in the dusk of the evening. This signalises the arrival home of the colony of crows after their day’s work is over. The approach of sunrise, on the other hand, is announced by the chattering and squabbling of numerous flying foxes overhead. At sundown the passage of immense flocks of crows and flying foxes in opposite directions across the strait which divides the island from…
