Meet the cockchafer, a very silly-looking beetle with a very silly name. Even its scientific name, Melolontha melolontha, is ridiculous. And it has the most redonk head gear! It looks like it's glued tiny fans above its eyebrows and is about to step onto the dance floor. As Joe Brown of Bernoid says, cockchafers are "never not funny." Discover Wildlife tells us more about the cockchafer:
Cockchafers, also known as Maybugs, have distinctive, fan-shaped antennae.
A cockchafer is a type of large, flying beetle that can be quite noisy. The cockchafer is sometimes called a 'doodle-bug' or May bug, although it is in fact a beetle.
There are two species of cockchafer found in the UK: the common cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha) which is found in the south of the UK, and the northern cockchafer (Melolontha hippocastani) which is found in northern England, Scotland and Ireland.
Here are some awesome photographs of the weirdos from Alex Hyde, Warren Photographic, and Bernoid. And here's a very cool "Country Diary" entry from May 31, 1922. "Country Diary" is a daily natural history column from The Guardian that has been published since 1906. Check out this description of cockchafers in a garden in North Oxon in 1922:
Every evening the garden hums with cockchafers. They favour particularly the beech and hazel hedges, but are to be seen more or less everywhere. There is something pleasantly poetical about their droning, plundering flight. They seem to express the contentment which the hot weather brings and the relief of the cool, dark evening after the blazing sunshine of the day. But they have great appetite and if this season suits their families as well as last would seem to have done they bid fair to be as thick next year as Egypt's locusts and will strip the trees; another reason for enjoying to the full this lovely verdure while it is here.
