A friend of a friend has given us temporary custody of an unidentified animal. It is here on the desk beside me, stomping round and round its cell in the way a tiger patrols the perimeter of its cage. In truth, the "tiger" is a 3mm beetle, its cage a clear plastic bug pot. To the naked eye it is nondescript, somewhere between black and brown, round-edged rectangular rather than oval.
The householder in Cople village who found this and five others of its kind indoors cannot tell if the beetles slipped in from the neighbouring fields or woods, or are from a more exotic source inside his food cupboard. Last night we photographed the beast using a macro lens and discovered a truly fantastical creature. Blown up to 50 times its actual size, it revealed a shell that seemed to be covered in pubescent down, and an armoured breastplate, the scutellum, bowed to give it a dowager's hump. The beetle's hairy legs had two-pronged toes with hooked tips, as if they were designed for litter-picking, the forward-thrusting front pair leaning on their elbows. On its head were chocolate-button eyes, but most remarkable of all were its antennae.
I look into the pot again to study its feelers and all I see are protruberances no bigger than a day's growth of stubble – hard to reconcile with yesterday's photo showing antennae decorated like scrolled violin heads, with extravagant peg-like projections. I suspect this beast is one of the boring beetles, named not for their looks but for their grain- or wood-burrowing habits; it is now destined to go to a proper entomologist for identification. The unwitting captive has stepped too far up the sloping edge of the pot again and rolled on to its back. It can lie there for hours at a time, legs in the air, perfectly still.