About ten days ago, I went on a basic walkabout that ended up netting me a whole series of photos that I've had fun sharing. This is the last of that series - and I apologize, in advance, for the indelicate subject matter. I found it interesting, though, and it's certainly an important part of real life!
On my Sunday morning walkabout, I came across some indisputable evidence - once again - that we share our property with coyotes. In the gateway between our Back 5 acres and the front area, I came across a significant pile of coyote scat. (That's biological talk for poop. It sounds much more professional to talk about scat, though.)
The scat seemed to be moving, which piqued my curiosity, so I looked at it a bit more closely.
In the center of the pile, almost completely hidden, was a large black beetle - a tumblebug,
Canthon sp. As I sat there waiting to get a good photo, I notice another area of the pile start to move and got glimpses of 2 more tumblebugs hard at work. This was, unfortunately, the best photo I was able to get without disturbing them at their work.
Tumblebugs are dung beetles. As their name (and locale) suggests, they get their nourishment from animal dung. In the case of the tumblebugs, they form large balls of dung which they roll away from the original pile of scat and bury, laying an egg on each ball before sealing it into the ground. The egg hatches and the tumblebug larva uses the dung as its food source to grow and mature.
Dung beetles are important decomposers. Despite its "ick" factor, their lifestyle literally helps clean up the world and recycle "waste" nutrients.
As I tried to get photos of the tumblebugs, I couldn't help but notice that the coyote scat was full of grasshopper parts. Note the grasshopper abdomen just above the tumblebug in the photo above, and the broken piece of grasshopper hind tibia to the right of the beetle. One of the best ways to learn what a wild animal is eating is to examine their droppings. This coyote was evidently gorging on grasshoppers, a fact that makes me particularly happy. This coyote is welcome to come and eat as many grasshoppers as he or she wishes, every day, all day.
Also on this pile were several house-fly sized flies that, nonetheless, looked a little different from "normal" flies.
When I worked to identify them, I found out that they are flesh flies,
Sarcophaga sp. Many flesh flies are actually parasitic or predatory. (The larvae of at least one species bores into grasshoppers and kills them as they eat. Despite feeling rather bloodthirsty as I write this, I'm rather hoping that species of flesh fly is very active in my yard this year.) The species I saw on this pile of coyote scat was evidently one of the flesh flies that, like the tumblebug, is a decomposer, propagating in animal droppings.
There was one other insect on this pile of scat, a very small, irridescent fly - or actually several of them. I never could get a good enough photo to identify it at all.
The flesh fly is at the top of this photo, for scale. The small, irridescent fly is on the underside of the...dropping.
This is as good a photo as I could get of the small fly, which isn't good enough for me to identify it without some good guess as to what I'm looking at.
As a final note, when I did another walkabout on Thursday morning, 4 days later, this is all that remained of the coyote scat. If I hadn't know it was there from Sunday, I would have completely missed it.
Really, all that was left were a bunch of grasshopper parts, evidently pieces of exoskeleton that didn't have any nutritional value left, I guess.
Four days to go from a standard "dog pile" effect to a thin layer of grasshopper parts covering the ground. That's a cleanup crew, in my mind!
