Jane Howard goes on a poo hunt to track down the dung beetle residents of Coopers Farm Last month, having been to a talk from the local beekeepers, I was inspired to write about the habits of the male honeybee. Well it’s happened again. A few days ago I found myself wandering around a field inspecting cow pats. On a dung beetle safari no less. As any farmer will tell you, whether they grow crops or raise livestock, the success of the farm depends on the quality of the soil. Traditionally small mixed livestock farms always had a few sheep, a few cows and a few acres of corn, and by moving everything around year-on-year the soil was always healthy. And one of the main reasons for that was the widespread presence of dung beetles. But here in the South East – thanks to a huge loss of land to development, less and less livestock on farms and far greater use of chemical wormers and insecticides – they are struggling. Which is why I went on the 'Dung Beetles for Farmers' safari. The morning was spent learning why they matter. There are four types: Dwellers that spend their entire life <strong>inside</strong> the pat; Tunnellers who spend more time beneath the pat, burrowing into the soil to build brood chambers and pulling the dung down for their larvae to feed on; Stealers who use the Tunnellers' tunnels for their own larvae and then there are the Rollers made famous by David Attenborough. Rollers are more commonly found in warmer, drier climates, which means fewer animals and more competition for the dung. So any self respecting dung beetle happening across a pat will bundle it up and roll it away before another beetle comes along. Without dung beetles the world A dung beetle des res has to be of a firm consistency, a sloppy mess really won’t cut it. And it can’t be too fresh or too old would be covered in dung – horse, cow, sheep, goat, antelope, elephant whatever. So they really do matter. In order to find them we needed to find the 'perfect pat' and that is quite an art. A dung beetle des res has to be of a firm consistency, a sloppy mess really won’t cut it. It also has to be of good depth so as to give them somewhere to hide from predators, flat pats are a no-no. And it can’t be too fresh or too old – dung beetles like it about 2 or 3 days old. However, there are lots of fly species whose eggs thrive so long as they hit a fresh, wet cowpat. Most lay eggs on the surface, but you have to admire the enterprise of the female horn fly who has really nailed it. She lives on the cow by sucking blood, but as soon as her host begins to defecate, she whizzes round the back and lays her eggs in the steaming stream of mid-air dung. And as they will land <strong>inside</strong> the pat rather than on the surface the eggs have breathing horns – yes, breathing horns – that project above the surface. They will hatch out in large numbers as long as the good guys, the dung beetles, don’t arrive to eat them. So armed with this abundance of scatological information we set off with charts, pencils, pots and rubber gloves to see what we could find. And yes, we did find them. So exciting that I went straight back to Coopers Farm and continued the search and we have them too. Who would imagine that a cow pat and a beetle could bring such joy. Maybe I should get out more! istockphoto.com/ sarahdoow / Ian_Redding priceless-magazines.com 106
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