Chinese Fond of Swallow's Nests

1896

Crocodile Steaks and Rats

Of all strange foods that men have ever used, the one that seems most singular to us is the bird's nest used by the Chinese. The edible nests are those of the Nicobar swallows, found in the cluster of islands of that name in the Bay of Bengal. These nests form one of the principal exports of the islands. They are held in the highest estimation by the Chinese, as an article of food, says the Boston Traveller.

In Siam the flesh of crocodiles is sold regularly in the markets as human food. They are eaten by the natives of Africa also. Herodotus says they are eaten by the Egyptians near Elephantine, though worshiped and their lives sacredly preserved by the inhabitants of other parts of Egypt. The alligators of North and South America were eaten by the aborigines, as they are still in some parts of these countries.

The general rule is that beasts of prey are not good for food, but there are striking exceptions to the rule, and, among others, the tiger is sometimes eaten in India.

There seems to be no really good reason why rats should not be eaten, and in the country where they originally belonged, China, they are commonly used for that purpose; as, indeed, in Paris, during the siege, people were often glad to sit down to a feast of this kind.

The fox, though an object of sport, is seldom thought of in connection with the table, yet it is sometimes eaten by Indians.

All Fear The Mantis

1914

Remarkable Attitude of Prayer While In Wait for Prey

Most persons know the praying mantis — that large, greenish, grasshopper-like insect which holds up adoring arms as if venerating some deity of the woods, or making an invocation — an oracle among insects, as the old Greeks thought it. But these attitudes of prayer conceal the most atrocious habits; these supplicating arms, to fall into Fabre's picturesque phrasing, are lethal weapons; these fingers tell no rosaries, but exist to seize the passer-by.

Although a member of a vegetarian family, the mantis feeds exclusively upon its living prey. It is a tiger in ambush; and if only it had sufficient strength its ogrish appetite and its horrible facility of concealment by color and form among the green leaves where peaceful insects travel would make it the terror of the countryside.

At first glance it does not look very terrible. Its neck is flexible and it can turn its head and look with sharp eyes all directions, but no formidable jaws affright a victim. In its powerful uplifted forelimbs lies the hidden, danger, the cruel trap. Each long thigh, shaped like a flattened spindle, carries on the forward half of its lower face a double row of steely spines, alternately long and short; and three needlelike spikes, longest of all, rise behind the parallel rows, between which the fore leg lies when folded in "prayer." This fore part of the leg is similarly armed, but with smaller spikes, and terminates in a hook with a blade like a pruning knife and a tip as sharp as a needle. Handle the insect incautiously, and this armament discovers itself to you instantly, thrusting its needles and blades into your flesh gripping you in a stinging vise and forcing you to crush it to get free.

When the mantis is in repose these weapons are folded and pressed against the chest, showing nothing of their ferocity. The bandit's sword is sheathed and it seems at its devotions. But let a victim come within reach and the ruse — if ruse it be — is abandoned like a flash. The three long joints of the deadly forelimbs straighten and shoot out their talons, which strike the victim like the unsheathed claws of a cat and drag it back between the saws of the thighs. The vise closes with an upward motion, as a man would bring his hand up to his shoulder, and no cricket, grasshopper, beetle or spider can struggle out of the crook of that terrible elbow. — Harper's Weekly.

Child Carried Off by An Eagle

1901

Child Rescued Half a Mile From Where the Bird Flew With Its Prey

Denver, Col., Jan. 31. — Tony Giovanni, a 2-year-old child, was seized and carried off by a gray eagle while playing in the yard of his home in a Denver suburb. The child's screams brought the father and two other men to the door of their home in time to see the bird and child disappear over the bluff of the Platte river. The men gave chase and saw the eagle alight on a small island covered with undergrowth, half a mile from the child's home. When the men arrived at the island the bird attempted to rise again with the boy, but his clothing caught in a bush and the eagle, seeing the men close at hand with clubs, dropped his prize and flew away.

—Davenport Daily Republican, Davenport, IA, Feb. 1, 1901, p. 3.