Guess it must have been stag beetle day yesterday.
Always loved stag beetles as a kid, fascinating looking things. There used to be loads round our way. Great memories of finding them on the school playing field, putting 2 males together and watching them having a wrestle.
The house we used to live in had a huge population living under the lawn and one day every summer, holes would appear all over the lawn and the sky would be filled with them, sounded like a lancaster bomber fly by. There were some old long dead rotten trees long the front of the lawn when we moved in, covered in ivy. When my dad, with help from a 7 or 8 year old me, eventually got round to ripping them out a couple of years after we moved in, we found the source of all the stags, all around the rotten roots were hundreds of big fat juicy witchetty grub type larvae, we filled the holes back in but not sure if they made it, we never got as many or any hatching from our garden after that.
Walking back from the corner shop last night, walked past the old house and saw 5 or 6 of the things flying around above me, really ridiculous flying things, totally vertical, eyes pointed straight up to the sky with no idea where they're going. One flew into my face, then bounced off a lampost, another was just repeatedly flying into a street sign. They do make me laugh.
Happy stag beetle day everyone, look after them, they're getting rare