Wow, wow and thrice wow

Our profound thanks to our friends Martin and Denise for alerting us to the sight of the year - migrating cranes coming in to their overnight stopover in the Brenne. This is just a quick post and we have all the videos (with stereo sound) and Tim's photographs to come.
If you can, GO TOMORROW!!!!

We've visited l'Étang de la Mer Rouge many times without seeing much. Our friends had visited on Tuesday and were raving about it - would the birds all have gone on? We saw not one crane as we pottered around the Brenne this afternoon. However at La Mer Rouge I caught the sound of a few calls on the wind.

At last (4:20ish) parties of cranes started to fly in. Lots of cranes. They milled around a bit - and flew on! Just over the wooded hill on the other side of the Étang.

Should we go or should we stay? We went. We found them again near the chateau de Bon Asile down a dead end off the D20, which turned out on further map study to be a continuation of the Chemin rural du Blanc that leads past La Mer Rouge. There were a few hundred cranes in the fields opposite the house but the incredible noise hinted at many more on the far side of the hedge.

Still they were restless. Tim spotted an osprey perched on a post in the middle of the field. A murmuration of starlings happened. Then...

Then the cranes took off en masse. Thousands of them. They were streaming back towards La Mer Rouge. What a sight! Both of us switched our cameras to video and filmed until we could no longer hold up our hands. Still they came  past.

Another dash, this time back to La Mer Rouge in rapidly failing light, and the cranes were visible as grey bands on the far bank. Marvellous!

But why thrice Wow? We were just eating our tea back home when I thought for an instant that one of the cameras had started playing a video by itself. I could hear cranes. I could hear cranes outside! Two large parties were circling up there, one above us and one above Grandmont or La Jarrie. No idea how many, it was pitch dark, but there were easily several hundred, going by the racket, and could have been as many as a thousand. And they were looking for somewhere for a little R&R. Forty minutes later, we heard them again. I think as I write this that they are just along the valley...

Update: 11,500 cranes were counted in Indre the following morning.

A further update [Sunday 16th at 11AM]:
We missed them... but there have been parties and singles seen over our region...
yesterday, we saw a group of twelve flying south-east....
in the direction of the Brenne...
and a singleton flying west...
the weather has bottled them up... and yesterday Grus-Grus reported...
that from Indre...
"plus de 35 000 grues sur les dortoirs en Brenne, ce qui constitue un nouveau record"...
so the spectacle goes on...
and will stay this way until the weather improves!

Stanley... his last year.

Stanley... 2011 to 2014 [possibly]

Stanley was found early this year on our woodchip "patio"...
we had decided that the existing woodchip had composted a bit too much over the winter...
so I began to remove it to use as mulch on one of the front flowerbeds.
Shortly after I began, I started to find chafer grubs...
probably Rose Chafer... our most common....
when I un-woodchipped a monster with really powerful looking jaws...
he was three times as large...
his sides were less complex than the chafers'....
and he looked altogether more solid.

The "young" Stanley

He was found near a chunk of willow log....
that we'd been using as an impromptu glass/mug putting down point...
and was most certainly a large, rotten wood denizen.
A quick look through the most likely suspects revealed nothing like him...
so I went for the less obvious and realized...
quite quickly...
that he was a Stag Beetle [Lucarnus cervus] Cerf Volant!
Cor! Exciting... well, I thought so.
he was living off the rotting woodchip of our "WOODCHIPIO"®...
although mother probably hadn't laid him there...
more than likely she'd laid her eggs in the old chunk of... then... slightly rotten willow.

Stanley can be recognised by the simpler folds along his sides...
this is a Rose Chafer grub and Stanley for comparison...

Stanley is on the left... the Rose Chafer larvae are inset...
note the much more ridged appearance of the two chafer grubs...
also their smaller head.

What to do with Stanley...
little else than pot him!
A reasonable size black plastic pot was to hand, so a handful of the chosen "feed" went in...
followed by himself... and topped off with yet more expatio.
Not long after, I found another smaller specimen, not as active as Stan...
but still too large to be a Lesser Stag Beetle larva...
the adults of which we get plenty passing by on the "WOODCHIPIO"®...
that one was also duly potted up.

The two pots were stood by the back door so I could keep an eye on them.
After about two months I noticed that Stan's food had depeleted somewhat...
so I took the opportunity to change the media and have a look at both specimens...
the smaller one was no longer with us...
just a husk remained... parasitised??
But Stanley was still very active...
and a right woodworker he'd turned out to be!!
And, as you can see below, a plastics muncher as well.
He was duly repotted into an old ceramic flowerpot...
I'm sure that black plastic wouldn't do him any good!!
The pots were always given the occasional watering to keep the expatio moist.

This...
PLUS...

These...
EQUALS...

THIS!!!

Another couple of months past and I noticed that the food level hadn't gone down very much...
had the plastic damaged him?
Only one way to find out, tip the contents of the pot out.
Only half came out...
along with this splendid pupa...
I breathed a sigh of relief...
took the pictures below...
upended the pot again and put it gently back over him...
and using a bit of card, returned Stanley to the upright.
You can see the inside of the pupal "case " in the second picture below.

Side view.... No wonder the Egyptians revered the Stag Beetle...
looks just like a Mummy!!

And you can see the edges of the sarcophagus here!!

They spend three to five years in the dead wood of the tree trunk...
but how long Stanley had been on our "WOODCHIPIO"®...
who knows...
he may have been laid there by a female we spotted close by a few years before...
or in the wood whilst it was stacked out on the pré by the old trognes....
there is plenty of rotting willow that never got brought up to the hangar down there.

This is not Mummy... this female was pictured by the longère in July 2010

But the "WOODCHIPIO"® hadn't been there before the "Big Freeze" of 2012...
that was when we ground up all the dead Cherry Laurel and made the sitting out area...
However, the chunks of willow had been out under the trognes for a couple of years before that.
So, who knows....

So, how long does the pupal stage last?
About four months at least...
because a few days ago, on checking the pots early in the morning, I found Stanley...
struggling, upside down on the top of his expatio!!

Stanley... wide-eyed and legless!!

Unfortunately, I feel he's hatched too early...
the latest, unseasonably warm spell after a cold snap might have triggered his emergence early...
too early to find a mate... pity.
There is a wonderfully illustrated and interactive life-cycle on Maria Fremlin's website.

Some Stag Beetles we've come across....

This one was trying to cross the road...
not a good survival technique, really!!

 

We found this really huge one crawling allong the pavement in La Celle Geunand...
he was four inches from the tip of the antlers to the tail...
impressive, non?

Sitting on the car bonnet...
"C'mon... If you think you're big enough!!"

Stanley...
a bit on the small side...
I don't think his diet was really up to scratch!!
Call these "antlers"!!

As you can see from the above pictures, we do get quite a few Stag Beetles in this region....
partly because of the vast amount of forest which is managed mainly for hunting and firewood.
But how long this situation will continue, who knows...
a lot of new building, especially institutional and commercial....
has been designed to be heated using woodburners....
mainly in the form of woodchip... but also log and pellet.
At Paulmy, a woodchip supplier has set up a "chippery"...
to coin a word... and is buying up waste wood to convert and dry.
In Descartes, the local paper works is looking to build a CHP* unit...
this will be using an estimated 200,000 tonnes of woodchip [plaquettes] garnered from a radius of around 100 kilometres.
To make this viable, the closer & cheaper the wood the better...
and that means all the "brash"... the wood too uneconomical to sell as firewood...
and normally left to rot in a pile....
suddenly has value and will vanish from the environment...
and along with it the potential for wood boring beetles to exploit stacks of rotting timber...
to our loss, environmentally.
Individuals can counteract that loss by stacking old timber...
neatly and closely, in a corner of their property...
or, if you have the space, anywhere convenient...
for example; two decaying chunks have fallen from our old "trognes"...
they have been left where they fell... I now mow around them...
and the "cleanings" from the river I managed to get dumped on our side of the Aigronne....
I will harvest the most useful wood from those piles...
but the remainder will get stacked, closely, for beetles and other wildlife.
So, please, create a "dead log" pile, somewhere.

And if you have youngsters... or grandchildren who visit...
invest in a Junior Bug Observation kit or two...
and point the young ones at the "dead log" pile...
all will be quiet for hours at a time...

-----------ooo~000~OOO~000~ooo-----------

*CHP = Combined Heat and Power

Some further reading...
Maria Fremlin's Stag Beetle site: http://maria.fremlin.de/stagbeetles/index.html

People's trust for endangered species
http://ptes.org/get-involved/surveys/garden/great-stag-hunt/

Days on the Claise: http://loirenature.blogspot.fr/2014/10/stag-beetle-lucanus-cervus.html
and
http://daysontheclaise.blogspot.fr/2008/09/big-black-beautiful-beetles.html