Wonders of birds and insects

Consider too how this mutual-loving trait exists in their nature: bats cling to one another like a string, each hanging from the next—a thing not easy for us human beings to achieve. For what is detached and private is preferred to what is shared and united with the many. How like the eyes of the owl are those who devote themselves to vain wisdom. The owl's sight is strong at night, but when the sun shines it grows dim. So too their mind is sharpest for contemplating vanity, but for perceiving the true light it has been dimmed.

By day it is very easy for you to gather wonder at the Creator from every side. The bird that lives with you rouses you to work, crying out with a sharp voice and announcing from afar that the sun is approaching, rousing travelers at dawn alongside them and leading farmers out to the harvest. How sleepless is the race of geese, and how sharp their perception of things that escape notice—they once even saved the royal city, revealing enemies who were already about to seize the citadel of Rome through hidden tunnels underground.

In what kind of birds does nature not display some wonder of its own? Who announces to vultures the death of human beings, when they march to war against one another? You could see countless flocks of vultures following the armies, inferring the outcome from the preparation of weapons. This is not far from human reasoning.

How shall I describe to you the fearful campaigns of the locust, which rises all at once at a single signal and encamps across the breadth of the land, and does not touch the crops until the divine command has been given to it? How does the seleucis bird follow as a remedy for the plague, possessing an endless power of eating, since the God who loves humankind made its nature insatiable for the benefit of human beings?

What is the manner of the cicada's song? And how are they more musical at midday, by the drawing of air that they make in the expansion of the chest, as the sound is given forth? But I seem to fall further behind in my account of the wonder of winged creatures than if I tried to reach their speed with my feet.

When you see the winged creatures called insects, such as bees and wasps—for they have been named this because they show incisions on every side—consider that these have no breath and no lung, but are nourished entirely through their whole body by the air. Therefore they are destroyed when dipped in oil, since their pores are blocked; but when vinegar is applied at once, they revive again, since the passages are opened. Our God created nothing superfluous to need, nor lacking in any necessity.

Again, when you study the water-loving animals, you will find a different construction in them: feet that are neither split, like those of the crow, nor hooked, like those of flesh-eaters, but broad and membrane-like, so that they may swim easily on the water, pushing through the liquid with the membranes of their feet as with oars. And if you observe how the swan lowers its neck into the deep and brings up its food from below, then you will discover the wisdom of the Creator—that for this reason he gave it a neck longer than its feet, so that, letting it down like a fishing line, it may procure the food hidden in the depth.