Battling Beetles And How To Conserve These Endangered Species

They were once thought to summon lightning, and we still have lots to learn about stag beetles if we want to conserve these wood-munching leviathans.

- Kate Bradbury

The 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