PETEK THE WHALER

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 83, 22 September 1947, Page 3

PETEK THE WHALER

What ho, what ho, ma hearties! Well here we are again. The pets and I have had a lovely time during the fine weather. I got a boat from the “Good Endeavour” and we rowed all round the Island, I did a spot of fishing too but I never caught anything. After Peterkin had succeeded in tangling himself up in the fishing line for the third time I decided to .give it up. Poor old Butinsky looked a picture wrapped up. in his new coat sweltering in the heat. Still I suppose I will have to get that cold better somehow. We rowed around to a little bay and lay on the sand for lunch. It was lovely and Peterkin went in for a swim. He said the water was nice but it is still far from warm enough for me. I like the water warm. I once had a swim in the dead sea. You may have heard of that strange sea. You don’t have to swim, all you do is lie on the top of the water and it keeps you afloat. I was as salty as a piece of pickled pork when I finally got out. Well I must get on with the story now so cheerio. P.T.W. OUR STORY LIGHTHOUSE BUTTERFLIES This week I have decided to tell you about butterflies I have seen in my travels. I saw all these when I was at a lighthouse in England. There are all sorts of ways of keeping yourself interested in a lighthouse. Some of the men go in for carpentry, metal-work, rug-mak-ing and all sorts of jobs. One of the hobbies I am most interested in is watching wild life. You get a chance to see all sorts of things from a lighthouse that the landsman never sees. I heard on the wireless the other day that the story that little birds migrate on the backs of big ones is only a legend. Now I know that that is true because I have seen it many times. I have picked up the large bird dead when it had flown into the lighthouse and found the small bird stunned nestling between its feathers. Once I took the stunned bird away and kept it until daylight and then released it none the worse for the collision. It was a golden-crested when. I have also known the small fly-catcher travel in this way too. When I was on the South Bishop lighthouse off Pembrokeshire I have seen not hundreds but thousands of birds in one flight in the migratory season. They appeared first of all in a great (Jark cloud blotting out the moon and then a few minutes afterwards I have heard the swish of their wings as they passed overhead not a hundred feet up. When I was at Start Point lighthouse in South Devon in 1934 I saw a large migrate of Silver Y moths leaving the country in August. It Jooked as if the lighthouse was in the middle of a snowstorm. I captured between three and four hundred with one sweep of my butterfly net, and to my surprise amongst them were a good number of Red Admiral butterflies. I was particularly pleased by this discovery because for a long time the lepidopterists (men who study insects) had suspected that the Silver Y emigrated from Great Britain. After that I saw several more of the same kind and I have often seen migrations of Clouded Yellows, Painted Ladies, and large and small white butterflies coming in during the hours of daylight, flying about three feet above sea level. At night I have captured a good many other specimens, including the rarer kind of hawk moth such as the Bedstraw Convolvulus, PriVet, Poplar and Death’s Head. The Death’s Head, by the way, is the only moth in the British Isles that can make a noise audible to the human ear, and it sounds like the faint squeak of a mouse. You can hear it whenever the moth is disturbed or touched. I caught one once in a fruit shop in Kingsbridge in South Devon, and the owner of the shop was afraid to touch it because of the noise it was making. A PUZZLER My small nephew looked very worried this morning. It appeared that his little sister Jane had tied his pa up with a knotty question. “What is it?” I said.

“Well, you see,” he replied. “She asked Dad—if she had been his sister would she have been her own aunt? Now would she?”