SOMETHING OLD AND SOMETHING RARE: THE WORK OF ONE OF SOUTH CHINA'S EARLIEST NATURALISTS
By Emmett EastonMr. John Crampton W. Kershaw was an Englishman who lived in Macao for much of the first decade of this century. He wrote a book entitled Butterflies of Hong Kong which was published in 1907. He received acclaim from his peers due to this work, and Frederick Muir, one of the travelling entomologists of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association, came to Hong Kong and Macao to meet him. For a number of years they worked together and published several papers on the insect order Hemiptera.
John Kershaw and Frederick Muir collected various insects in Macao as well as in the Dinghushan forest reserve (in Guangdong), which was known at that time by the English as Haulik or How-Iik. Insect specimens that both Kershaw and Muir collected in South China are present in the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu. During the time Kershaw lived in Macao he sent specimens to Hawaii and to George W. Kirkaldy, a noted authority on the Hemiptera. Kirkaldy described a new species of cicada from Macao, naming it Balinta kershawi after its collector, and the type specimen is currently in the Bishop Museum.
I have found a number of species of cicada in Macao since my arrival in 1988, but had not seen Balinta kershawi until only recently (June 1998), when one specimen was found in a densely forested portion of the Seac Pai Van Agricultural and Forestry Park on Coloane Island in Macao. This year, several more specimens were observed emerging from the ground from late May to the middle of June. This is apparently a rare species of cicada which has not been previously recorded in Hong Kong to the best of my knowledge. Due to its short period of activity as an adult and the apparently limited flight range, it could very well be present in Hong Kong and not yet discovered.
Many of the species of cicada, such as Cryptotympana, are strong fliers and can be found throughout the territory of Macao soon after they emerge from the ground. Balinta kershawi Kirkaldy, however, seems to not fly very far from its nymphal habitat, and this is surely one reason why it is so rarely seen and there are apparently so few specimens in museum collections.
Kirkaldy published a paper describing Balinta kershawi in 1909 in the Annals of the Entomological Society of Belgium (vol. 53: 177-183). The insect is mostly shining black, but the hind wings are crimson or vermilion coloured at the base, and there are submedian sinuous or winding stripes down each side of the medium region of the pronotum.
This species is somewhat similar in size to the red-nosed cicada, Huechys sanguinea (De Geer), but in the latter species the crimson or red colour is on the head, thorax and abdomen, and not on the wings. Both species have been found in the same forested habitat in Macao, and even though H. sanguinea has been seen emerging from the ground in early summer, it is most commonly observed locally later on in the season, from September to November.
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