Poo

With "evenings in" currently being the order of the day I have begun to attend a few carefully selected free talks. The Sussex Wildlife Trust offer a varied programme which I reckoned would give me an excellent chance to learn more about what's in my locality [I found out last week that blackbirds are a member of the thrush family] I couldn't resist signing up for one on wildlife dung [I know, I am your weird friend]. 

Without pinching the entire content of the talk I can now tell you that we have our very own UK dung beetles [thank goodness we do otherwise our country would be awash with the stuff] and that they have different ways of dealing with it. What we do lack here are the "rollers" [cue Pixabay free image above]. I hadn't appreciated that these fellows are actually going backwards when they are moving the dung balls yet they have an amazing sense of direction and can move their quarry a huge distance in relation to their body size. Every once in a while they'll stand on top of their ball to realign themselves using the sun or the moon as their navigation point. One species even uses the Milky Way....scientists proved this by placing little hats on the beetles heads covering their eyes. The result of the experiment was that the beetles starting going every which way, but once their headgear was removed their normal patterns resumed.

Bet that wasn't what you were expecting to read this morning!!

Arilx