metal screening of porches and breezeways, waiting with motionless patience for the passage of moths, mosquitoes, and any other insects attracted to lights shining into the darkness from the interior of a house. It is not unusual to see three or four of them pursuing one hapless insect, approaching it like so many stealthy cats after a lazy bird. They utter a chirping, birdlike sound, quite loud and insistent, and they are generally known as "island canaries." It is not difficult, in fact, on hearing their voices for the first time, to imagine the voices of birds. When frightened they sometimes shed their tails and dart away to a safe corner or crevice. I have heard natives say that it is considered very bad luck to kill them, and they are esteemed in native houses and left unmolested in their hunting much as the European cricket was, and still is—as an omen of good fortune.
Guam's only snake is a blind earthworm with microscopic eyes, about six inches long. It looks more like a giant earthworm than a reptile, though it is minutely scaled. Like the salamander of Western America, its habitat is the damp places beneath rocks and building foundations. Turtles are common sights while one is reef or boat fishing near the shoreline. In aboriginal times they were caught from outrigger canoes, but this art is lost, as is the need for the turtles. Their shells were of great value in former days, and pieces were used for money and jewelry.
Insect life on Guam is not too varied, but there is an abundance of all species of the mosquito and the stinging ant. The mosquito on Guam is non-malarial; mosquito nets have not been much used since the advent of modern screening and the use of insecticides. Nevertheless, their presence in oppressive weather can be a great nuisance.
The stinging ant (solenopsis) is another matter, for its persistency is well known to the natives of Guam and will soon impress the visitor. Foraging as they do in expeditions, they will cross any obstacle in a straight line and have even been known to kill baby chickens with their considerable sting. Fleas are rare; the humid climate is not agreeable to their propagation, and lice and bedbugs are virtually unheard of. They are so rare that the aboriginals blamed their original introduction to Guam on the early navigators landing at Umatac.
Two species of butterflies formerly unknown to science were discovered on Guam by the Freycinet expedition during its several months' stay on the island in 1819. There are several handsome dragonflies to be found in the interior valleys near water and some large water bugs that skate over stagnant pools.
The white ant or termite causes extensive damage on the island, despite efforts to exterminate it. Whole houses, seemingly sturdy, have collapsed after an army of these industrious eaters have devoured its sub-surface insides. Nor do they stop at dead wood; they are known to attack live trees.
There is a small scorpion on Guam whose sting is not dangerous, and several spiders exist, none of them poisonous. Centipedes are common and have a painful though not serious bite. They are often found under stones or dead wood, and the female may be surrounded by a brood of young.
The social wasp (P. hebraeus) is a most interesting insect. As mentioned previously, it spends the greater part of the year in the open country, nesting in bushes where it builds its pendant larvae cells. In the dry months from December on, it invades the eaves of houses. Sometimes it will infiltrate to the interior of a house in great numbers, massing like bees in corners and rafters. The cell-making wasp will fill all available openings with repeating cells and can be found to have plastered a nest in rolled-up papers and under the lids of long-unused boxes and cases. No possible nesting place in a house is safe from this busy insect. It is not uncommon to unroll a stored map, a calendar, or a picture and find a group of these dried mud cells attached securely to the inside of the roll.
FISHES
Although today fishing on Guam has only a minor importance in comparison to its role at the time of the 1898 occupation, still many Chamorro natives net-fish in the shallow reef waters about the island, catching various small fish that move in schools through the clear water of the lagoons. Fresh-water fish have never been highly prized by the indigenous people, and, although one group of early explorers caught sizeable, edible fresh-water eels in Guam's streams, the natives disdained them as food, preferring their sea-food diet. However, the aboriginals did eat fresh-water shrimp from rivers and streams. In remote parts of Guam even today a few bamboo fish traps and primitive seines are used in coastal fishing. At the turn of the century a profitable business was carried on with this method on the southern coast, the fresh fish being shipped across the waist of the island to the Agaña market.
However, the Chamorros, over the several centuries of their known history, have come in from the sea. They no longer fish much from boats, almost never from canoes, and cannot swim today like the human dolphin Pigafetta describes in his narrative of Guam. The ancient custom of trawling from canoes for flying fish and bonito has died out; fresh and canned meats augment the local cuisine today. Still in some spots the natives employ an ancient method of stupefying fish with the crushed fruit of the futu tree, a strand tree whose seagoing pod is often found to have sprouted in the outcroppings of the live reef. When dry the fruit is used as floats for native nets. Safford cites its use in reef fishing at the turn of the century in a vivid description:
"The fruit is first pounded into a paste, inclosed in a bag, and kept over night. The time of an especially low tide is selected, and bags of the pounded fruit are taken out on the reef next morning and sunk in certain deep holes in the reef. The fish soon appear at the surface, some of them lifeless, others attempting to swim, or faintly struggling with their ventral side uppermost. The natives scoop them up in nets, spear them, or jump overboard and catch them in their hands, sometimes even diving for them."
Since this poisoning method of fishing was highly popular with the natives from aboriginal days and since it always killed a great many fish not necessarily eaten, the Spanish prohibited the custom. Safford states that after 1898 it was revived under the Americans, although at the present time the method has been superseded by the extremely dangerous technique of dynamiting the reef's holes for fish. This is also now prohibited but continues to be employed, sometimes fatally to the fisherman as well as the fish in the area of explosion.
Although Apra Harbor's complete industrialization has eliminated the beautiful mangrove-swamp shore line except at two or three wild, untouched points around its inner periphery, low tide can still produce a phenomenon Safford described with wonder in 1899:
"In the mangrove swamps when the tide is low hundreds of little fishes with protruding eyes may be seen hopping about in the mud and climbing among the roots of the many-petaled mangrove. These are the widely spread Periphthalmus koelreuteri, belonging to a group of fishes interesting from the fact that their air-bladder has assumed in a measure the function of lungs, enabling them to breathe atmospheric air."
The fauna of Guam range considerably beyond this brief chapter listing. Safford, because of his intense and careful study, includes other unusual tropical fishes, for example, which cannot be discussed here: hermit crabs, night-feeding land crabs, sea crabs, and a large variety of deep-sea fish occurring throughout the Marianas and in and about most of the lagoons and shores of other Pacific islands and atolls. The foreshortened attention given here to wild life of all groups has been purposely narrowed down to direct the reader's attention to the scene an inhabitant of Guam might observe in casual trips about the island, to what his untrained eye would naturally recognize as the moving faunal panorama which gives a startling and vivid dimension to the physical portrait of a characterful island.
4
The Aborigines
The Chamorros at the time of Magellan's Umatac landing were a proud primitive people, highly evolved for their type of civilization and radiantly healthy. They had built a picturesque society entirely self-sufficient unto the island and its neighboring chain, and they were apparently quite content with their resultant life.
Early descriptions of the aborigines are scarce. They are generally described as tall and robust, not too dark, with skin pigmentation somewhere between that of the American Indian and the Oriental. The men were handsome and powerfully built, and the women were usually opulent-busted and graceful. Although obesity and deformity are rarely sighted in the records of early-day observers, Padre Sanvitores did not agree with one of these omissions. "The Marianos,"