T
HE phone rings at 9.30pm on a Tuesday
in June: “Guess what I’ve got in my hand?”
Richard ‘Bugman’ Jones – entomologist and
regular contributor to BBC Wildlife Magazine- caught a female stag beetle flying round his garden
earlier in the evening, and now has a shiny, antlered
male to complete the set. I can’t wait to see them up
close for myself, so I pay him a visit next day.
Richard proudly shows me his Tupperware boxes
of live stag beetles – a male and two females – as well
as the collection of body parts gathered over the years,
including one spectacular haul after an incident
involving a playing field and a lawn mower.
“I had more,” he says casually. “But I donate
the best specimens to [London’s] Horniman Museum.”
Richard lives in Dulwich, the capital’s stag beetle
heartland. “Back in the day, South-East London was
full of woodland,” he says. “When the city started
to take shape, buildings were erected piecemeal –
not like now when a bulldozer just razes everything
to the ground. Much of the habitat was left intact.”
This means that some of the ancient, dense woodland
of South London is buried as rotting stumps and fallen
logs under the gardens of Peckham and East Dulwich.
Stag beetles are literally breeding in London’s past.
“They’re docile really and will only nip if you push
your finger between their mandibles,” says Richard,
holding the live male and demonstrating, but
the ferocious-looking beetle doesn’t want to play.SubUrban warrior
The stag beetle Lucanus cervus is Britain’s biggest
beetle, with males reaching up to 7.5cm long. In the
UK, the species is mostly found in south-east England
and is truly urban, carving out an existence in
the heart of London as well as in suburban areas
such as Surrey and Colchester. We don’t know
why populations are concentrated here, though
there are several theories.
One is that the line of chalk running from the North
and South Downs through Hampshire and up into
the Chiltern Hills and Wiltshire might be responsible.
A researcher discovered a fungus that helps stag beetle
larvae by breaking down tough woody cells, makingBig questions remain about
how many of our magnificent
stag beetles remain, where they
are, and why they’re so fussy about
the kind of wood they eatBB-FOTOGRAFIE.NL