THERE'S not much to a barn owl really; they display remarkable energy and grace, wrapped neatly in feathers, but possess very little else of substance.

I know because I found one the other day, or what was left of one. It was lying face down and wings spread in a beck-side meadow...cause of death unknown but probably starvation.

It's been a long, hard winter for barn owls, not because of the cold, but because of the relentless wet and wind. They can't hunt in the rain so lots of valuable feeding days have been lost in the last few months.

I turned the feather-light corpse over to check for injuries (some people will shoot anything) and found none, but was shocked to see that it was crawling with beetles. These weren't any old coleopterans, but a type called sexton or burying beetles.

These creatures have an incredible life-cycle which, as their name suggests, involves dealing with dead bodies. The beetles that I found on the dead barn owl had been drawn from up to a mile away by the smell of decay and once there will have been hoping to meet a mate of the opposite sex.

If they do, and once the wooing and sex are over and done with, the two of them will join forces to perform a gargantuan feet – they will bury the body that they have found to hide it from other would-be scavengers. Small birds and mice are relatively easy to deal with, but a barn owl is a different proposition. I suspect the beetles will remove what they can of the owl’s abdomen and bury that, leaving the skeleton and wings on the surface.

Once underground the meat stash will become a larder-cum-nursery on which the female will lay her eggs. Unusually for beetles, both the mother and father will stay with the hatched larvae for four weeks until they become adults themselves. During this time these doting parents will defend, clean and even feed their babies on pre-chewed meat.

We have five species of sexton beetle in Ryedale and I was naturally interested to find out which of these had claimed my deceased owl so I took photos to compare with descriptions in my field guide back at home.

At the time I thought that my beetles were one of the three species sporting orange patches on their wing-cases until I examined the photos later. It turns out that the pale patches were lots of parasitic mites clinging to the beetle’s body – a very common phenomenon apparently.

"An all-black body, large eyes and orange club-tipped antennae," confirmed the final identification as Nicrophorus humator. There is no English name for this beetle in common usage so, as from now, I am going call it a big-eyed black sexton beetle and hope the label catches on.

Now, I know the more ghoulish among you will be wondering if sexton beetles have ever been known to eat human flesh and the answer is yes. Not only that, the phenomenon is documented in the Natural History Museum. Way back in less politically correct times the eminent entomologist A M Massie and a colleague discovered a dead tramp in the New Forest. Before reporting their find to the authorities, they grabbed the arms and legs of the unfortunate gentleman and shook his body over a spread sheet. The numerous sexton beetles they subsequently collected can be found in a cabinet in the museum labelled, "Dead tramp, New Forest. A M Massie". Astonishing.

If you want to see sexton beetles in action and don't fancy planting dead mice in your garden as bait, then go onto YouTube and search for "burying beetles".