This week I have been working, once again, on the picture book biography of entomologist Jean Henri Fabre. He continues to amuse me. In a chapter from Fabre’s THE LIFE OF THE CATERPILLAR, he writes:
“After unsuspectingly passing a whole morning with my insects, stooping over them, magnifying-glass in hand, to examine the workings of their slits, I found my forehead and eyelids suffering with redness for twenty-four hours and afflicted with an itching even more painful and persistent than that produced by the sting of a nettle.”
He goes on to explain the source of his pain: hairs on the body of the Pine Processionary caterpillars he had been watching all morning. Fabre was the first to note that these caterpillars grind tiny poisonous hairs on their bodies into even tinier poisonous dust particles, which float invisibly in the air, landing and stinging anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby.
Fabre, dedicated seeker that he was, did not let a few stinging hairs stop him observing and recording the life and times of these caterpillars. But he did lament to his readers:
“No, the search for truth on the back of the Processionary is not all sunshine.”
Goodness, I adore this man.
(I searched everywhere–but couldn’t ultimately find–a picture to illustrate this post; I know I took some neat shots of a funky, hairy yellow caterpillar last summer … but my image filing system is a bit, er, underdeveloped. Sigh.)