Pincer Movement
I always look forward to hopefully seeing a stag beetle or two in the early summer. Despite being a hotspot for them in this part of Essex, it’s never a given.
Thankfully my very first sighting of the year wasn’t my last as it was a gruesome scene whereby a male was being eaten alive by red ants. Despite only the head and top section of the thorax being present it was still very much alive during the ordeal.
My second sighting was when I came face to face with a large airborne male beetle. Quite literally, given that I was cycling at the time and it flew straight into my face. If I had been yawning at the time I would have been able to inform you what a stag beetle tastes like because it was very much a direct hit in the mush. Luckily it was along a quiet road and I was able to rescue it from its unplanned, emergency crash landing spot, before it was at risk of getting run over. Having a second beetle meeting a gruesome ending would not have been pleasant and I might have considered I was cursed.
Still looking impressive despite its mid-air collision with my face.
I saw a few beetles flying over the garden during the warm still evenings and eventually I found a small male which had landed, giving me some photo opportunities. I’ve always considered stag beetles one of the hardest macro subjects to photograph. Their large size and odd shape means that extreme close ups aren’t really the order of the day and that the tried and tested low angle, head on shot, doesn’t exactly depict them in the best light. They can look less formidable and more comical from that view point.
The beetle was content to sit still giving me plenty of time for potential focus stacks so first of all I used this opportunity to get a close up of its incredible mandibles (opening photo) It struck me, when I viewed the photos back, just how similar these mandibles looked to the jaws of shrews and voles that you find in a dissected owl pellet.
The second stack I opted to take was head on but from a slightly higher angle so that the whole beetle was captured and hopefully looked pretty imposing. What the finished photo doesn’t convey is just how tedious the clean up job was in the edit. The beetle may well have been standing still but the antennae and palps most definitely were not. After some invasive digital surgery, the patient pulled through, with all appendages intact.
The final stag beetle marked the return of that potential curse. I found a female climbing up the side of the house. Initially I contemplated moving her to a more suitable spot but I decided not to interfere. Last year I had watched another individual scale the brickwork until she had gained enough height to successfully take flight so I assumed that would be the case here. A decision I immediately regretted when I found her the following morning, only a couple of feet further up the wall, wrapped up and being eaten for breakfast by a noble spider.
Unquestionably the largest meal I’ve ever seen any spider catch and I can’t help but admire her tenacity to bag such monstrous sized prey. Not the ending I would have liked for the beetle but for all I know she may well have successfully reproduced, was coming to the end of her lifecycle and is now providing the spider with some much needed sustenance so that she may continue with hers.
