Look what I found

Yesterday, I found a stag beetle wandering across the road - the adults are around between late May and are pretty much all dead by August so it was nice to see one this year as I haven't already. The one we found was a female - they are quite a bit smaller than the males and don't have the huge mandibles that give them the name.

Male stag beetle (not one that I found)

Instead they have smaller pincers - they can give you a nip but they don't really use them - they're much more likely to just flip over and pretend to be dead!  You would have thought that the males would be more likely to bite, but they pretty much only use their mandibles for fighting each other - just like stags.

This is the one we found, when we first picked her up, pretending to be dead .  I didn't put her like this - in fact, I tried to turn her back over but she just flipped back onto her back!  She stuck out all her legs and just lay there for a while until she presumably decided we weren't going to eat her - at which point she started scuttling around.

They're not the most elegant of beetles, walking or flying, but they can go quite fast if they want to.  When they fly, the males especially, their bodies hang right down underneath their wings and they make a loud buzzing noise.  They are all over the place when they fly, they look completely astonished that they can move about so much - probably comes from spending the vast proportion of their life as a little blind grub (they live for up to six or seven years underground before emerging for just a few months!)

Stag beetles are really amazing and the largest terrestrial beetle in Europe but their numbers are declining because people are inclined to remove the dead wood that the grubs live in.  There is an old stump near us (completely riddled with holes where other beetles have been over the years) we put her on it and she quickly crawled off into it so she must have needed to lay her eggs.

On an unrelated note, I was in Italy recently with my choir and I saw what I am pretty certain was a hummingbird hawk-moth!  If you don't know what that is, it's amazing! (useful I know) It's a moth which beats it's wings really fast and has a long tongue that looks like a beak.  I was so glad to see it and I only wish I had been fast enough to get a photo.  Unfortunately I was too slow so I will have to make do with one from the internet.  Nevertheless, it was brilliant and now means that I have seen five species of hawk-moth.

Now I really would really like to see (or find caterpillars of) the privet hawk moth which is native to England but which I have only ever seen in photographs.