A black giant on rain-soaked timber
The plank was dark with damp, studded with tiny water droplets, and on it sat a beetle so black and rounded it looked polished. Drops of water had collected on its shell without disturbing it in the least. The head carried a pair of horn-like projections, and the front legs ended in curved claws that gripped the wet wood without a tremor. It had clearly been there a while.
This is Lucanus lunifer franciscae, a stag beetle of the family Lucanidae, order Coleoptera, the same moon-bearer of a species I had met the day before, this time in black rather than deep brown. Finding the same species twice in two days was a small gift; I had come to Medog hoping for exactly this kind of luck. Lucanus stag beetles are mostly active in the warm, humid hours, and a wet plank in the forest is exactly the kind of place one ends up after a night of flying or a slow climb from the soil.
The larvae of this group spend their early years inside rotting wood, and the adults emerge to a short season of sap, fruit and searching for mates. In this weather the wood never quite dries, which is precisely what the larvae need. The horn-like projections of the male are used in shoving contests with rivals, a polite form of violence that rarely draws blood.
I photographed it with the water droplets as a backdrop and left it to its damp morning. The forest around Medog keeps its treasures on the most ordinary surfaces, and it was still there when I looked back from the path.
