We have dung beetles!

We went to clear a smelly mess out of the sheep paddock and found dung beetles everywhere.

That wasn’t what we were expecting to get excited about that day.

The sheep have been in a sacrifice paddock: a place where we accept a bit of wear so the other paddocks can rest. We’ve been feeding hay there, shifting where we put it out rather than feeding over the same patch every time. Some hay still ends up on the ground, and once the sheep have walked over it, urinated on it and pooed on it, they’re understandably less interested in eating it.

In the dry, that was working quite well overall. Then we had days of rain.

The waste hay, urine and manure became a wet mat. We started getting flies, and it started to smell. Neither was a good sign, so we got to work moving the mess out of the paddock.

That’s when we found the beetles.

They were all through it. What had looked like a job we needed to get on top of was already a very busy place.

And then we realised something else: the flies were gone.

We hadn’t noticed them disappear. We’d noticed them arrive, decided something needed doing, and only while doing it realised that part of the problem had changed.

We’d had dung beetles filed away under cattle. We’d love to have cows here eventually, and finding beetles in cow pats was something we’d imagined getting excited about then. Looking for them with sheep hadn’t really occurred to us.

The rain and all that trampled hay had made something much closer to a cow pat than the usual scattered sheep pellets. Apparently it was worth moving into.

Finding them here feels like a huge win. Some worming treatments can harm dung beetles, with residues in the manure affecting the insects that use it. That’s part of why we care about what happens beyond the animal we’re treating. We don’t routinely dose our animals, and we do treat them when they’re sick. Seeing beetles everywhere is something we’re very pleased about.

It has dried out again now, though not back to drought dry. We’re still getting showers here and there, and November, December and January are our main rain window, so there’s more wet weather ahead of us.

There’s still a paddock to sort out. But finding dung beetles in the middle of that job made it a much better day.