Summer World_ A Season of Bounty - Bernd Heinrich [69]
Most of this drumming—often ten to fifteen minutes at a stretch—came from the same areas and occurred shortly after light at dawn and in the half hour before dark. No other woodpeckers were drumming then. But here they drummed—one to the west of me, one to the north, with a third joining in from the east. The sapsuckers’ drumming at this time, after the young had fledged, was curious. These birds had long since staked out territories and had already paired up in May. Were they making territorial claims on the sap station?
I am glad I got to know the sapsuckers a little better than I had known them before. Now they had become unique. It seemed that I had discovered new neighbors. And through them I had met a diversity of life at our common summer “watering place.” My summer woods are richer now than they were before.
15
Deaths and Resurrections
5 August 2006. I’M MET BY THE SMELL OF ROTTING flesh, and it’s not hard to find the source—the remains of a half-grown wild turkey that had been killed and partially eaten by a coyote or a hawk. The coyotes here in these Maine woods are nocturnal, and the turkey had been killed next to where it was taking a dust bath on an anthill by my maple grove, so it was killed in the daytime. A coyote would have dragged it off; maybe it was killed by one of the pair of red-tailed hawks living in the area. I lift the carcass and find meat left on it. To my surprise I also find a horde of hundreds of shiny black beetles, which scuttle off and burrow into the duff of dead grass and decaying leaves. They are shiny, streamlined, and fast. I dig after them with a stick, and discover also two species of boldly marked orange-and-black sexton (or burying) beetles. They tuck in their legs and play possum as soon as I expose them. These beetles are monogamous and care for their young, which they rear in a small nest. The parents gather meat and, in response to their grubs’ begging, regurgitate the half-digested food to them. The father repels intruders, mainly other male sexton beetles that try to kill the babies and try to mate with the female to get her to produce a second clutch, with them.
As I dig deeper under into the soil, I see no sign of the black beetle horde. But along the way I discover two species of sylphids. These are round, flattened black beetles with rough upper surfaces; one species has a thorax edged in yellow, and the other is edged with orange. Less numerous but also prominent are two species of staphylinids, or rove beetles. These lithe, elongated animals with tonglike pincers don’t look like beetles, because their elytra (wing covers) cover only a small portion of their backs. Their wings are folded up into a small package and tucked underneath those small elytra. One of these staphylinids is black; the other is brown and dotted with shiny gold-yellow flecks. In flight, they sometimes resemble wasps.
Fig. 29. Some of the beetles found at the turkey carcass.
When I came back to the turkey carcass twenty days later, the meat was all picked off and dermestid beetles had come and taken their share of the drying remains of skin and bones. No more beetles were visible, but down in the soil I unearthed a gem—a beautiful, iridescent, shiny purple dung beetle that I had never seen before.
EVERY SUMMER THIS HILL BECOMES THE BIRTHPLACE OF countless mammals that range in size from pennyweight pygmy shrews to moose. It is therefore also, necessarily, the dying place of, on average, the same kinds and the same numbers of animals. Most of the small mammals and birds are quickly buried, each by a pair of sexton beetles. This is summer work. The big animals die mostly in the winter, and they have other agents that bring them to the beyond. I think of an old bull moose. His fresh tracks showed that he had staggered through my pine grove; then he collapsed in the snow by a stone wall almost within sight of the cabin.
The moose first became food for coyotes that tore him open, and then several dozen ravens feasted.