Quote: It is difficult to appreciate how vast a number of birds, beasts and insects inhabit the fields and woods, and we may well ask ourselves the question “What becomes of their dead?” In a day’s search we may not find among all the teaming wild population a single stiffened body, or one bright eye glazed in death. Here in a clearing we may have chanced upon some blood-stained grass, and a few scattered feathers, which gave evidence of the hawk or carrion crow, but this is very far from accounting for anything like the greater proportion of the short-lived race.
Has Nature, then, her undertaker? Certainly she has. He is appropriately known as the Necrophorus mortuorum, or more popularly as the sexton beetle, for he is equipped with spade and all that is necessary for “undertaking.”
-Bertram S. Puckle, 1926
Here in Asheville the 17-year cicadas are out. They emerged in insane numbers about a week ago and are noisily mating and dying all over town. What they do, see, is dig out of the ground all at once and shed their skins while hanging on a leaf or the side of a building, then sprout wings. There are hundreds of castoff skins down under the dead cherry tree out front. They are big bugs, about the same size as a bumblebee, and I gather they have no protection except tasting bad.
Wonder how they know to all emerge at the same time?