Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

Firewood Collections  For those of us lucky enough to have an ultra-low emission burner as a cosy heating source, the yearly job of gathering and stacking firewood is an excellent hobby that keeps us fit and creates interesting opportunities for discovery of organisms.  I love looking at tunnels in wood bark beetle scribbles under pine bark and macrocarpa which are elegant sites for caterpillars to pupate (over-winter), and locating the winter hiding spots for native cockroaches, slaters, booklice, barklice, millipedes and centipedes.  The reason I study my firewood before bringing it inside to be burned is sometimes you get critters in there that perhaps need to be rescued from a firey end. Native Grassgrub beetles (Odontria) often hide between stacked logs. Outside they are dormant and won’t move a lot at all until temperatures go up in a month or so. But when you take the logs inside, they wake up and fly around like miniature lawnmowers (same sort of noise) in your living room. Lifecycle is completed on t