This is an anecdote which has almost absolutely nothing to do with the
subject at hand.
In summer 1981 I was waiting at the south entrance gate of Macquarie
University to give a fellow student a lift to a night lecture. The entrance
has been changed from what it was then, at which time the road surrounds
were almost bare dirt with little widely-spaced tufts of grass. I got out
of the car and was standing on a slightly raised bank on the side of the
road when a car turned into the entrance with its lights on and I was
suddenly aware of literally hundreds of little jewels of light over the
ground around where I was standing.
To satisfy my curiosity I went back to my car and got a torch, which
revealed that I had been standing in the middle of a field of hundreds of
spiders all looking out of their little burrows. I returned to the car,
hastily.
I got the impression that I only saw the reflections of their multiple beady
little eyes because the main beam of the car was not hitting directly on the
ground but, because of the slope, was shining above and parallel to the
surface.
Ralph Reid
Sydney
Birding-Aus is on the Web at
www.shc.melb.catholic.edu.au/home/birding/index.html
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message
"unsubscribe birding-aus" (no quotes, no Subject line)
to
|
