the beetle yard

i bought a house this year, and was AMAZED at the amount of wildlife in the yard. after living downtown for years, it was a very welcome change.
some of the first signs were the incredibly high worm traffic...

early in the spring, after rains, the yard would be criss crossed with worm trails. exciting for our garden!
i decided to make a lil ol' blog to keep track of all the great bugs and wildlife i get to encounter.

when i moved in, first thing i noticed was the massive dying tree in the yard. it had tons of root rot and the base was destroyed. it was full of holes from woodpeckers and bugs.

it was still late winter/early spring, so there wasn't much bug life, but there were LOTS of birds. red headed woodpeckers, flickers, and wrens were always around. as things started to warm up, the bird traffic in the yard went crazy. we felt bad, but needed to cut down the tree.
it was looming over our garage and the neighbors phone lines, and was already cracking in half.

as the arborists were cutting, slices of logs revealed TONS of wood boring beetle paths.
i got excited, cause i love bess beetles, and i knew we'd probably be seeing em. in fact, when i first looked at the house, there was a dead bess beetle in the garage.

all the logs revealed some sort of rot.
after the tree was down and we were busily cleaning up debris, i found a giant click beetle...

it was a good sign of things to come!