Tag Archives: Stag Beetle

Art, Natural History

Tara louise hughes’s marvellous insect faces

The Gunnersbury Triangle nature reserve this autumn has a new and wonderful nature trail: a series of insects’ faces by Tara Louise Hughes. Tara, when not studying art and illustration, has proven herself a capable conservation volunteer. Now, she has brightened up the reserve for children and adults with her painstakingly fire-etched close-up drawings of insects.

Her damselfly head is a study in miniature detail: the hundreds of pin-point eye-elements (ommatidia) in the insect’s large, forward-facing eyes; the precise distribution and length of the bristles on the top of the head and on the mouthparts; the accurately-observed antennae.

The Stag Beetle head is suitably fearsome, a study in armoured magnificence with interlocking chitin cases for head and thorax, and those extraordinary antler-like mandibles.

The Monarch Butterfly’s head couldn’t be more different: a study of a delicately furry head, a shy eye, and the tenderly coiled proboscis peeping out on the right.

With the Flesh Fly we’re certainly back in scary territory, the rows of stiffly corseted bristles announcing that this insect is ready for action.

The Buff-tailed Bumblebee, a mild and welcome presence in the reserve, and in gardens wherever there is a suitable supply of flowers. The furry insect seems shy under the artist’s gaze.

If not evil, the Red Wood Ant is definitely fierce and single-minded, as anyone who’s ever been bitten by one can testify. Tara’s fire-etching has brilliantly captured that take-no-prisoners energy with the insect’s smooth bullet head, businesslike antennae, and efficiently-hinged jaws. Take a careful look at those scorched textures at the top of its head.

Tara’s Tortoise Beetle shows the distinctly tortoise-like carapace from the underside, its knobbly texture skilfully burnt into the wood, the little head jutting out under the curved rim with the antennae cautiously feeling the outside world for possible danger.

Tara’s website is at https://taralouisehughes.medium.com/

Natural History

Magpie, red in beak and claw

Caution: this article contains no blood, but one of the photographs of an insect could be upsetting to sensitive readers.

Mallow beside the ramp meadow in Gunnersbury Triangle local nature reserve
A Magpie on the prowl for prey

Magpies are rather omnivorous predators, feeding on whatever they can catch – the eggs of other birds are a favourite, along with chicks, and the juicy caterpillars and larvae of insects. Unlike foxes, which will crunch up even large beetles whole (leaving wing-cases and other recognisable body parts in their droppings), they feed selectively, eating the soft abdomen of large beetles like the Stag Beetle, and abandon the heavily-armoured thorax and head. The beetles, their bodies broken and their chances of reproduction gone, clamber slowly and pitifully about, sometimes for days.

A newly-emerged male Stag Beetle in Gunnersbury Triangle, its abdomen and left wing-case removed by a Magpie, its right wing-case and legs broken.

On a happier note, we saw a Red Admiral resting in the woods on some Ivy. The Nymphalid butterflies are all getting scarce, so it was a welcome addition to the usual suspects — Brimstone, Small White, Speckled Wood, Holly Blue — on a day without much sunshine to bring the butterflies out.

Red Admiral
The surprisingly handsome flowerheads of Hemlock Water Dropwort, in the wet woodland

Natural History

Greater and Lesser Stag Beetles Over-Wintering at Gunnersbury Triangle

Tara with two species of Stag Beetle
The (Greater) Stag Beetle is a much bigger beast than the Lesser Stag Beetle
Enormous Stag Beetle larvae found deep underground on roots of dead Pear tree. The body of the larva is soft and white except for the hard brown head and legs, and extremely hard sclerotised black mouthparts, adapted for chewing wood. The plump larvae are a tasty meal for foxes, which can easily sniff out and dig for them in soft earth or rotten wood, so their only protection is to be deep down in a large block of wood. This is part of the value of leaving standing dead wood in the nature reserve; and it explains why we bury logs with several feet of their length below ground!
Natural History

Error 404 Summer not found… but bugs aplenty

Newly-constructed flood fences
Newly-constructed flood fences

Well, you probably don’t need me to tell you that this summer – yes that was Midsummer’s day we just had – has been a teeny bit wet.

Midsummer's day Full 'Strawberry' Moon
Midsummer’s day Full ‘Strawberry’ Moon, a once- or twice-in-a-lifetime event

We’ve had the car park flooded repeatedly in front of the hut, and two storm channels have eroded tons of soil down the bank towards the railway.

The British Summer compared to a failed install
Please try Spain: the British Summer compared to a failed install

Joking aside, we picked up some stout hazel poles and bundles of long slender binders, and sat at the top of the ramp with billhooks to sharpen the poles and cut them to length as withy-posts. We then hammered them into the very squishy mud of the main erosion channel, and did our best to weave the binders around them. They were a little dry and we heard a few ominous cracks, but in the main they wove in and out pretty well. We made two little fences with five posts each, leaving space for water to trickle below the basketwork, and indeed through it.

Scouring under flood fence
Scouring under flood fence

Last night there was yet another thunderous downpour, so this morning I went to have a look at whether our handiwork had helped. There was some scouring under the centre span of the front fence – overall, it looks as if the fences did a good job, but perhaps we need one more fence just at the front of the channel.

Female Stag Beetle in GT
Female Stag Beetle in GT

But happily, the bugs don’t seem to mind. I rescued this female Stag Beetle from a mat of weed in the pond: she seemed fine, holding on to my finger. She’s at least the third adult we’ve seen in recent weeks, so presumably many more have in fact hatched, a success for our loggeries and management approach.

Common White Wave moth Cabera pusaria (eats Birch)
Common White Wave moth Cabera pusaria

I’ve several times seen a biggish white moth rushing away to hide under bramble leaves. Today I managed to photograph one, which obligingly “hid” under a rhododendron leaf (yeah, we have some) and it’s the Common White Wave, Cabera pusaria. It likes Birch and Alder, so it must be living on our Birch trees here.

Male Sphaerophora scripta hoverfly
Male Sphaerophora scripta hoverfly

Mike instantly identified this handsome orange hoverfly as Sphaerophora scripta. It’s one of some 20 species he’s expertly noted in the reserve. A Volucella pellucens, the very large black and white species (with a pellucid whitish band on its abdomen, you really can see light through it) hovered unphotographably overhead.

A handsome orange hoverfly
Another smart orange and black hoverfly on Hogweed, Eristalis horticola, a new species for the reserve

The Hogweed with its large white flowerheads is proving extremely attractive to different species of bees (honeybees, Andrena, Megachile leafcutters), bumblebees (tree, garden, buff-tailed, and others) and hoverflies, including this smart orange and black one. Mike says it’s a male Eristalis horticola, a new species for the reserve. Yay!

These are some moth (geometrid?) eggs on the underside of an English Oak leaf.

Array of lepidopteran eggs on oak leaf
Array of eggs on oak leaf

Love of Nature, Natural History

Stag Beetle at Gunnersbury Triangle

Stag Beetle, just landed, wings not fully folded
Stag Beetle, Lucanus cervus, just landed, wings not fully folded

I was just walking around the triangle, talking to one of the Garden Design students about its natural history, when a mouse-sized animal scurried across the top of a post that we had hammered in to form a dead-hedge above the boundary stones. In my binoculars, it was at once clear what it was, a Stag Beetle. As I pulled out my camera, it spread its wings impressively, and flew a few feet across to the woven top of the dead-hedge, folding its wings but leaving the ends still sticking out of its wing-cases for a while.

Stag Beetle
Stag Beetle, side view

So, all that work on loggeries may have paid off. Or perhaps it didn’t: behind the dead-hedge was simply a pile of brash and logs, abandoned for several years. Anyway, we’re very pleased to see a handsome adult male out in the sunshine.

Azure Damselfly recent hatch
Azure Damselfly recent hatch

The triangle’s first batch of Azure Damselflies, surely within a day of hatching, perched on leaves of emergent water-plants, or flew around in cop, laying eggs already.  One or two Large Red Damselflies sunned themselves also.

Large Red Damselfly
Large Red Damselfly

P.S. A week later, on 4 June, a Lesser Stag Beetle crawled across the lawn in my garden. I guess it emerged from the dead wood stacked in odd corners for that very purpose. It’s a lot smaller than the Stag.

Lesser Stag Beetle in garden
Lesser Stag Beetle in garden

Lesser Stag Beetle, playing dead
Lesser Stag Beetle, playing dead

I picked it up to ensure I got a photo, and was rewarded with a fine display of thanatosis, shamming dead.

Conservation, Wildlife

Building a Stag Beetle Loggery

Packing the Logs in Tight

Today was an amazingly hot day for mid-March. It dawned foggy and chill, but quickly warmed up. Down at the Gunnersbury Triangle, a big pile of coppiced willow logs and some birch trunks were waiting to be built into a loggery. This is by intention a home for the stag beetle, which happens to have its British stronghold centred pretty much on south and west London. The stag beetle larvae are soft, white helpless grubs, a ready meal for a fox or a hungry bird – except that they live underground, or rather in timber which is in contact with the ground. They tunnel through the dead wood with their only really hard dark parts, their mouthparts, grow fat, split their skins and continue eating wood and tunnelling along, gradually making holes of larger and larger diameter. After some years – it can be up to seven – they metamorphose into handsome adult beetles with their black and shiny chestnut carapaces, walk or fly, mate, lay eggs in dead timber which is in contact with the soil, and die.

DSCN0268 Completed Trench for Loggery;
Completed Trench for Loggery

To accommodate this bizarre life history, we dug a trench somewhat more than knee deep – quite a feat in the sticky brown clay with some flint gravel – and packed in the logs as tight and close as we could get them.

DSCN0275 Shovelling earth into all interstices
Shovelling earth into all interstices

We then jammed short lengths of smaller wood in between the logs to prevent them from wobbling, and finished up by shovelling earth and clay into all the gaps and stamping it well down.

DSCN0276 Completed Loggery
The Completed Loggery

The rest is up to the beetles – millions of years of evolution has given them a superb ability to find suitable places to lay their eggs – and then with luck in a few years’ time we will see some shiny new stag beetles walking heavily about the reserve.