Who Lives Here?

Since we live at the outskirts of our city, right next to a giant nature preserve with loads of old oak trees, it's to the latter we head for most of our walkies. Scattered throughout the forest and the meadows are man made homes for endangered species, from giant owls to tiny insects, to help them survive in the safe haven of the nature preserve. We walk past them every day. Today we decided to take a closer look.

This wooden box of roughly a cubic metre is the home of the stag beetle, Lucanus cervus, according to the picture on it. It is the largest beetle in Europe, measuring up to 8,5 centimetres. The box was filled with sawdust and bits of old oak logs. Nobody was home, which was just as well considering the rather intimidating jaws it apparently has.

Speaking of intimidating, on the way back through our very favourite sheep pen, one of those nasty snakes with zigzag pattern slithered across the path, just two metres in front of us. We do NOT like that.