My last post was on a feisty inhabitant of English leaf litter - see
A gift - and my brillaint friend and writing mentor
Mary Shanahan responded with a wonderful poem on another British beast. She's kindly allowed me to share it here.
Ocypus olens
Whiplash quick
you've curled your coal black body
around the corner of the night step
caught like a scorpion in my torchlight
you, creature of the shadows,
wave your beaded antennae at me
every morsel of your shape
exuding dark fierceness
yet you have no sting
treacherous rove beetle,
but you poise, voracious,
to pounce and crush
to stab and crunch
devouring with razor jaws
and now, on your guard
lest I, like a late bird, or peckish rat
may eye you for a swift sharp snack
beware! you will bite me if you can
Perhaps you ate the core of Eve's apple
and will strike me dead now that
I have gazed upon your jointed form
You, glorious pincered stinker,
disappearing beneath a flat stone
where only you will be safe.
Mary Shanahan Nov 2025
On the 3cm-long devil’s coach-horse
Mary's poem reminded me of an encounter I had decades ago. I had a summer job with what became Natural England, documenting collecting invertebrates throughout Shetland. I was part of a full eco-team and one of the botanists left a devil's coach-horse on my desk tied into a plastic bag. When I got back from my fieldwork tho all that was left was an empty plastic bag with a hole chewed out of it.