Stag Beetles

I found a couple by the front door. First one was a female, decent size and she liked to try to bite my fingers when I was handling her. I let her go after watching her scramble around the bottom of a plastic tube I had left from a set of brushes. Then, last night, I found her again… and a few minutes later I found a male who had flown oh-so-gracefully into the wall near the porch light and landed in the patch of bark mulch and clovers by the front steps. He was even more aggressive and they were crawling over each other and flipping one another over in the tube. Then I let both go in the clovers and now they’re probably going to have hundreds of babies.

I didn’t even know we had stag beetles around here, so that was pretty cool. I hope I find more; particularly males with huge mandibles like the ones in my entymology books.