"Poop" Elf?

The most helpful beetles have moved into my yard!After reading the Harry Potter books, I wanted to have a house elf - instead, I got "poop" elves - even better when you have a bunch of dogs!

This morning, I timed them....a pile of poop at 8 AM, will be a pile of dirt by 2 PM. There's a bunch of them in the yard... by 2 PM, there is no morning poop to pick up. I feel like I've won the lottery!

Apparently there are two working in tunnels below the poop. The female tunnels and the male shoves out the dirt. The female takes the poop below, deposits her eggs in it and a week later, you've got babies feeding on that and on to your next generation.

In this photo, the beetle looks green, but it either has yellow on it, too, or is iridescent on it's back...at any rate, it's colorful.

This pile of dirt is the result of their hard work. Not only do they get rid of the poop, they aerate the soil, too.

I looked up these nice helpful beetles...they are African-Asian in origin. The link is to a taxonomy site, the paragraph below it is from a site about TX agriculture and the benefits of these to cattle.

http://bugguide.net/node/view/6180

From a site about the benefits of dung beetles for cattle and pastures:

Another group are the ‘tunnelers.’ An example of this group is Onthophagus gazella, which typically bury the dung balls under the manure pat or close to the edge. Piles of soil next to the dung pat are indicators of tunneler-type dung beetle activity. Collectively, tunnelers and tumblers are classified as ‘nesters’ because of their behavior in preparing a home for their young. The third group of beetles that use dung are the ‘dwellers’. Most dwellers belong to the subfamily Aphodiidae. They live within the manure pat, engage in little to no digging, and generally do not form brood balls.

If you live in TX, you can get some from the Agricultural extension services.... they are spread out from CA to SC, but no further north than SC. Wouldn't help those north of that line.