I was walking around the pastures a while back checking on everybody, and I came across this beetle in one of the watering tubs we have out for our goats. I picked it up to get a better look at it, and I realized that it was a dung beetle.
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| floating in water |
I just so happened to have my camera handy, so I decided to get some pictures of it up close. Unfortunately my camera's auto focus is a little crazy so I couldn't get a good up close shot. I would have preferred to delete my funky pink and wrinkly hand out of this shot, but it is what it is. As I was taking the pictures this beetle started crawling around on my hand. It ended up flying away after it had dried a little, which means that I saved it's life! I like to think of myself as a hero............OK, not really (ha ha)....but I really do like knowing that we have some dung beetles here on our farm. You can read about my thoughts of them on a previous post located here. I do warn you that there is a before and after picture of a pile of poo located on that particular post. The sight of that really doesn't bother me anymore, it's such a common thing around here. You know with so many cows, horses, goats, dogs,chickens, and various wildlife running around here; you just can't get around seeing poop. Oh. my. word. I can't believe I am just going on and on about poop! For those that have not left this blog after all of my ramblings, please forgive me. I'll try not to do that again :)
One thing that I'd like to mention is that dung beetles are excellent additions to your pastures if you are
interested in pasture management. They help to "recycle" the "wastes" in your pastures.
Here are some interesting articles/sites that I found while looking for info on dung beetles:
http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/ent/notes/forage/guidetoncdungbeetles.pdf (this is a pdf with 7 pages.The last 2 pages have pictures of all the different types of dung beetles.
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