A Favored Stag Beetle Celebrates Our Nation's Birthday

Tonight, Ian found a beetle in front of the house - a gigantic one, definitely over two inches long, and quickly identified it as a "stag beetle." In short order after the spotting, Ian was employing a bug-catching kit that was one of the party favors at a birthday party we attended recently, and was snagging the poor creature with a bright-green pair of bug-catching tweezers and a matching green plastic "bug zoo."

Amy wasn't convinced that the bug was a stag beetle, but a quick visit to the Internet, which I led, sent Ian into near-convulsions of satisfaction with the correctness of his classification. (It turns out that there are over 12,000 species of "stag beetles"...) After our visit to Wikipedia, Ian spontaneously professed that stag beetles are fascinating.

In the course of our Internet explorations, I came upon a picture of a long-haired young Westerner cramming a scorpion on a stick into his mouth in Beijing, followed by salacious tales of insect- and reptile-eating adventures in China. When Daniel became fully aware that one can get hold of a stag beetle or scorpion snack in China, this factor atrophied his feelings about the Middle Kingdom:

"I think we shouldn't be in China, but if we did go in China then we should not eat anything."

Ian, meanwhile, was acting on our recent discovery that stag beetles sometimes eat melon, procuring a slab of watermelon for his own new pet. Amy was horrified, and of course I couldn't leave that alone. (She had believed that the beetle was likely to eat our porch, but after our impromptu research, where we learned that they like fruit, she came to understand that instead, he was responsible for the disappearance of many cherries from the cherry tree on our front lawn; the birds were apparently exonerated after all...) Since we were getting ready to go out to see fireworks for the Fourth of July (yes, more fireworks...), I said that perhaps our new, hard-shelled friend would like to see the fireworks, although we may need to leave him in the car while we step out to view the pyrotechnics. All of this was intended for Amy alone, and had exactly the desired effect, but soon I experienced the long reach and bitter authority of the Law of Unintended Consequences...

The boys and I made the journey to a nearby city to look at the fireworks, and as we stood at the end of a residential street, near the stadium where the fireworks were being set off, with our gaze in the air (and in my case, with Daniel on my shoulders), I suddenly realized that Ian was standing at a distance from us, holding something large and plastic level with his head, much the way you would hold a camera to capture some special moment. Quickly, I realized that the "camera" was actually the stag beetle in his plastic bug-zoo. Ian kept the stag beetle in this elevated position until the fireworks were finished...

[Meanwhile, as we set off to go back to our car, I practically had to pry Ian off the lawn of the hapless household in front of whose property we stood while we were watching the fireworks, because he was crouched down by one of their bushes, apparently looking for company for his favorite new pet.]

As Ian was getting back into his car-seat, I asked him, mostly tongue-in-cheek, if the stag beetle had enjoyed the fireworks. He quickly told me that he thought he had, and suddenly it hit me that he probably wasn't joking. Daniel pointed out that the fireworks might have scared the stag beetle, but Ian said that he didn't think the creature was actually scared by the fireworks, because he didn't make any attempt to hide during the display. That's when I realized that Ian was entirely in earnest in bringing the beetle to the fireworks and holding him up high enough that he could hopefully get a good view of the show.

Ian is extremely considerate of all of his pets, and I should have known that a two-inch, black, hairy-legged, hard-shelled creature with "antlers" would not be any exception.

(July 4, 2011)