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I once bamboozled a whitetail doe. I was quietly treading on granite through a patch of scrub oak above Devil’s Cascade in the Boundary Waters Wilderness. The deer materialized from cover and froze. She was 15 yards away, staring at me, ears twitching. I was also still, staring back, when a light breeze brushed an oak leaf against my cheek, sparking an idea. I slowly turned my head, snatched a leaf with my teeth, plucked it loose, and made a show of chewing. The doe stepped closer, and I repeated the move, acting like a harmless herbivore. She continued to approach — curious? puzzled? hungry? — until we were only 20 feet apart. I was hunting bear and happened to be gripping a rifle. I raised the Winchester to my shoulder and aimed. The doe didn’t budge. Only when I spoke — “I’m teasing you!” — did she bolt. So: If you’re stalking prey and have lost the predator’s advantage of stealth, imitate an herbivore.
I was reminded of that mimicry while reading biologist Bernd Heinrich’s engaging book “Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death.” Heinrich is a legendary observer, and E.O. Wilson, no slouch regarding research, called him “one of the finest naturalists of our time.”
A subject of Heinrich’s work has been dung beetles, of the scarab family. Many hundreds of species harvest excrement from such as cows (here in Minnesota) and elephants, and roll it into balls, inside of which they encase their larva. They bury it, the dung providing shelter and nourishment for the larva, which pupates inside. Eventually a beetle rises from the ground, or “from the grave,” as it were.
This beguiling process was noticed by the ancients, perhaps offering hints about the nature of life and death. Most notable, at least in the context of the dung beetle, were the Egyptians, to whom, Heinrich notes, “the dung scarab beetle represented Khepri, the sacred scarab that rolled Ra, the sun god, up into the sky in the morning.” The ability of insects to metamorphose — a seeming resurrection — provided observers more than metaphor. It’s probably no accident that Egyptian mummies resemble the pupa of a scarab beetle, and that corpses so-wrapped were provided with food, writes Heinrich, “in a dark, concealed chamber with a long tunnel (such as that dug by scarab beetles) … .” An acme of mimicry. During the embalming process — end of the “larval” stage? — the Egyptians usually excised the corpse’s heart and replaced it with a carved scarab. The Minnesota junebug, a member of the scarab family, affords you an image.
Keenly minding the natural world is a worthy mission, and while no mummies have emerged, vibrant, from their “pupas,” I admire the ardent observation that inspired the ancients to mimic the life cycle of dung beetles. After all, if it worked for the bugs …
The premise was that humans are related to all life, and if scarabs can transpose from apparent death to apparent rebirth, perhaps we can learn the skill from them. Worth a shot.