Alexandra...

I found a little beetle; so that Beetle was his name,
And I called him Alexander and he answered just the same.
I put him in a match-box, and I kept him all the day ...
And Nanny let my beetle out -
Yes, Nanny let my beetle out -
She went and let my beetle out -
And Beetle ran away.

She said she didn't mean it, and I never said she did,
She said she wanted matches and she just took off the lid,
She said that she was sorry, but it's difficult to catch
An excited sort of beetle you've mistaken for a match.

She said that she was sorry, and I really mustn't mind,
As there's lots and lots of beetles which she's certain we could find,
If we looked about the garden for the holes where beetles hid -
And we'd get another match-box and write BEETLE on the lid.

We went to all the places which a beetle might be near,
And we made the sort of noises which a beetle likes to hear,
And I saw a kind of something, and I gave a sort of shout:
"A beetle-house and Alexander Beetle coming out!"

It was Alexander Beetle I'm as certain as can be,
And he had a sort of look as if he thought it must be Me,
And he had a sort of look as if he thought he ought to say:
"I'm very very sorry that I tried to run away."

And Nanny's very sorry too for you-know-what-she-did,
And she's writing ALEXANDER very blackly on the lid,
So Nan and Me are friends, because it's difficult to catch
An excited Alexander you've mistaken for a match.

Thanks to A.A.Milne's poem, when the children were young, all shiny round black beetles were known as Alexander in our household, and this seems to have stuck. Mind you, this fine specimen is actually Alexandra; she's a lesser bloody-nosed beetle Timarcha goettingensis, a very local species of dry grassland in south-east England. She eats bedstraws and here is seen on a patch of lady's bedstraw.

The beetle?s common name comes from its unusual defence strategy of exuding bright red fluid from its mouth when threatened, though this one didn't seem t feel the need to put this into action. As well as providing a visual deterrent, the fluid is foul-tasting thus putting birds and other would-be predators off the beetle as a lunch option.

I'm still catching up from our short holiday - I've processed quite a few of the photographs (mostly taken in grey, grey conditions...) and hope to backblip over the next few days. I also hope I'll have some time to catch up with all your journals, though with Alex starting college on Monday and report deadlines looming, my comments may still be somewhat thin on the ground
:(