Formerly distributed throughout Eastern North America, the American burying beetle, now only occurs in the wild in Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Rhode Island. The last American burying beetle reported in Ohio was in 1974. Reasons for the decline of this largest of the carrion beetles are unclear, but may include increased competition from scavenging predators. Lack of small carcasses to bury would prevent the species from reproducing, and changes in land uses have reduced the quantity of small- to medium-sized birds and mammals preferred by the American burying beetle. Even the extinction of the once ubiquitous passenger pigeon may have had a ripple effect on carrion feeders like this beetle.

Reintroduction of the American burying beetle into Ohio involves carefully planned match making skills. Before leaving the comforts of their captive breeding facility, George Keeney an entomologist at OSU, places one female and one male beetle in a plastic container to ?get to know each other.? Once at the wildlife area, volunteers and Service biologists, prepare the site for the beetles? release. For each beetle pair, we dug a plug about two feet across and then "flipped up the lid" of sod and scooped out some of the soil in the hole. A small cave was dug in the wall of the large hole to place the carrion in. We used dead quail as our carrion source. The pair of beetles were positioned on each quail and the soil plug returned. Screening was placed over the plugs to reduce scavenging of the rotting quail.

American burying beetles form a brood chamber and prepare the carrion for use by their offspring. Burying beetles are one of the only species of insects that display a high level of parental care, with both males and females tending the larvae.

Two weeks after the reintroduction, we returned to the site to estimate our success rate. Unfortunately, scavengers had dug up 22 of the 78 quail from the soil plugs. We carefully examined a subset of the remaining sites for the presence of American burying beetle larvae. We found an average of 9.6 larvae per site, which resulted in a brooding success rate of 76 percent! This is an excellent result, as wild caught/released beetles only average a 40 percent brood success rate. It appears that captive rearing may be a highly effective recovery technique for this species in Ohio. Further monitoring through post release trapping will indicate how successful the beetles emerged into adulthood.