Jitterzoo

Jitterbugs are not crazy, wrote Animal Lover Ellsworth Jaeger in Nature Magazine last week. They merely carry on ancient dance patterns which lower animals developed eons before man appeared on the earth. Jive-Justifier Jaeger described jitterbug patterns of 16 animals, ranging all the way from "thread legged bugs" to caribou. Samples:

> Sometimes at dawn turkeys go "high-stepping." With lifted wings they hop, jump up & down, then spring forward. During this "Turkey Trot," the hens sing "quit, quit," while the gobblers make high-pitched rattles "like a hard wood stick scraped rapidly along a picket fence."

> At dusk, skunks often form in a circle for a dance, their noses touch, then they prance backwards into position again. This often goes on ten or twelve times with perfect rhythm until suddenly the skunks disperse, well satisfied.

> Once Ellsworth saw an old male porcupine who was shuffling around, "emotionally upset." Suddenly he hunched up his back, drew his forefeet close to his body, stood on his hind legs and thumped his feet, clicking his teeth in fast tempo like castanets.

> The hummingbird when in love sways back & forth like a pendulum attached to an invisible wire, in an arc of some twelve feet, and makes a sound "like a bow drawn across cello strings."

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