We're going on a stag hunt

The stag beetle’s intimidating appearance belies its vulnerability, says Claire Saul, as she discovers what we can do to help them survive

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IN the 1950s, it is said that eminent scientist J. B. S. Haldane was asked what he had concluded about God, based on his years of study. Referencing the fact that our planet hosts about 400,000 species of beetle and 8,000 species of mammal, Haldane reputedly responded that ‘The Creator, if He exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles’.

Beetle species do, indeed, present enormous diversity. Some are a familiar sight, but less so is the rare stag beetle, our biggest species at up to 3in in length. The sight of this huge insect taking a typically low, rather haphazard flight on an early-summer evening is a marvel to some and understandably alarming to others.

Our ancestors might have fallen into the latter category. Folklore credited stag beetles with the ability to summon thunderstorms as an agent of Thor, giving rise to one of the many vernacular terms, ‘thunder beetle’. Some believed that Thor enlisted their help to set thatched buildings alight. Others thought tucking a stag beetle inside your hat would provide protection from lightning strike, giving rise to its Austrian moniker of Hutklupper (hat pincer).

Insects in the early 16th century were considered lowly, disease-carrying creatures, but German artist Albrecht Dürer took the unusual step of devoting an entire work to a resplendent stag beetle, now in the collection of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, US. The 1505 watercolour is the ‘most influential and most copied’ of his studies of Nature. During the following century, insects increasingly became focuses of art in their own right, detailed illustrations being facilitated by the development of the microscope.

The European stag beetle’s scientific name,