Feeling the Pinch: Earwigs

I found this fine specimen of a male earwig Forficula auricularia under a rotten log today. You can tell it's a male by the curved pincers on the tail - the female's are much straighter. Earwigs can fly and have exquisite fan-shaped wings but they are tightly stowed away under those little wing cases and are very rarely unpacked. When this one suddenly found itself in the daylight its first instinct was to ....

... crawl into a crevice, so that .....

... only those tail pincers protruded, capable of delivering a painful nip - although their other purpose is to clasp the female's pincers during tail-to-tail mating. Somewhere the female would have been hiding away guarding her eggs through the winter and when they hatch in spring she'll continue to guard the young during their early stages of growth - compared with most insects, earwigs are very attentive mothers.

Millipedes

Habits developed in our formative years often stay with us for life and as a kid I could never resist turning over logs and stones to see what lurked underneath - and now, over half a century later, I still can't. I found these two millipedes under a rotting beech log yesterday. The first is the flat-backed millipede Polydesmus complanatus, which superficially looks like a centipede but if you look closely you can convince yourself that it has the millipede's trademark two-pairs-of-legs-per-segment. Flat-backed millipedes have a reputation for being fond of strawberries, which doesn't endear them to gardeners.

The second is the aptly-named snake millipede Cylindroiulus punctatus, coiled up like a serpent.

There is a wondertful YouTube sequence of rather more spectacular species of millipede featured in David Attenborough's Life in the Undergrowth series here.