24 July 2019

Living with bats and beetles

As I said in comments yesterday, it was 102ºF on the terrace yesterday afternoon, and over 100 in the loft. We spent the evening downstairs where it was much cooler, but then we decided to try to sleep upstairs. And we did sleep — both of us. The humidity was low and our big electric fan was stirring up the air. This morning it's about 79ºF in the house, which means it will be even hotter in here this afternoon than it was yesterday.


One thing that happens when the weather is hot and we throw all the windows open overnight or early in the morning, in an effort to cool the house down before afternoon and the heat of the day are upon us again is that things come inside. Since there are no window screens, animals fly in. Bats, birds sometimes, butterflies... in past years we've had gigantic moths up in the loft that could be mistaken for bats.


A few days ago we found the beetle shown here, an inch long or more, on the sofa in the living room. This one was cooperative and we used a dustpan to pick it up and put it back outside.


I'm not good at identifying European fauna, since I didn't grow up here and lived exclusively in French cities when I was younger, but this beetle seems to be called l'aromie musquée or, in English, the musk beetle. It's a kind of longhorn beetle. It flies. French Wikipédia says: Son nom provient de la sécrétion à odeur de musc très agréable que cette espèce émet. In other words, the aromie is smelly, but it's a pleasant smell. I personally didn't detect any odor.

17 comments:

  1. Without spending too much time on it to check lookalikes, I think you are probably right with the ID. I have serious beetle envy.

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    1. I think these beetles have protected status in certain regions, including Wallonie. And they are attracted to willow trees, of which we have several in the hamlet.

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  2. Glad you could sleep in the loft. Just one more hot day before it cools down, I think. Our high is only 87 here and the low 68- very pleasant weather for July in Alabama!

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  3. Maybe it's two hot days since Walt says the cooling will come on Friday. Bon courage!

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    1. The hottest day is supposed to be tomorrow Thursday. Then milder on Friday, and a high below 18°C on Saturday. That will be a shock.

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  4. Well, those are amazing photos of Mr. Beetle. I'm glad you have a good fan up there.

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  5. I know they're harmless, but if that thing landed on me, I'd shriek.

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  6. I'm sure you would recognize a cicada. Do they have them in NC?

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    1. I'm not sure we had cicadas on the NC coast, at least not like in Provence. We had crickets, for sure. And huge cockroaches.

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  7. You want cicadas? They were deafening here the other night, in western NC, talking to each other. First one tree would erupt in sound, then another would respond. They went back and forth for quite a while, probably telling one another to watch out for the crazy human walking the dog.
    I saw a dead one on the road, and the body was at least an inch long and the wings a couple of inches. Ginormous.
    While I wouldn't want beetles on the furniture and certainly not on me -- eek! -- your photos are wonderful. And up close, such amazing and efficient engineering in how they're made.

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    1. The coastal climate is so different from the western NC climate. I guess insect life differs too. Or maybe I'm mis-remembering. I do remember spending a summer in Winston-Salem in the 1960s and how fiery hot the weather was there compared to sea-breezy Morehead City. Also, I spent the summer of 1971 in Durham. I had a summer job with a roofing company after graduating from Duke and then heading to Champaign-Urbana for graduate school. We put a black tar roof on a tobacco warehouse that summer. I didn't think I was going to survive the heat.

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    2. I didn't know about this job- it's lucky you didn't fry up there and maybe there were tobacco fumes as well! Horrible.

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    3. I was paid $65 a week for that physical labor. And my work clothes and shoes were covered in tar. It was hotter than anything I've ever experienced since. And at the end of the summer, my employer gave me a week's bonus — $65 — for lasting the whole summer. It was positive experience.

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  8. Your roofing job reminds me of a story a friend of mine told me about a summer job he had doing some kind of construction-related work (he was either in high school or college). He said it was so bad that on the first day, when the supervisor had his back turned, he and his colleague ran away and never returned. By the way, my friend later became a judge.

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    1. I didn't cut and run. I needed the paycheck.

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