Rare endangered beetle finally sighted by biologist

Biologist Jeff Souza snapped the first photograph of a rare beetle in Shasta County in April, 2008, and announced his rare find at a conservation symposium last week in Redding on Nov. 20. He spent five years looking for the Valley Longhorn Elderberry Beetle, which is listed as threatened by the Federal Endangered Species Act.

A trademark of the beetle is the quarter-inch wide exit-hole in the elderberry tree, the only tree the beetle inhabits. The holes are easier to find than the beetle, as the hole lasts for a couple years. Souza managed to photograph the beetle as an adult. It lives for only a few days.

Souza, a senior biologist at Tehama Environmental Solutions, said his discovery of an adult beetle was due to "a bit of luck, quite frankly. It gets to a point where you're supposed to be looking for it, but you really don't. We crawled into the bush, looked down, and there it was on a leaf."

The discriminating beetle historically has made its home only in California's central valley and then only in the elderberry plant. Within record, the nearest sighting of the beetle was in Red Bluff.

After the female beetle lays eggs on the plant, the larvae hatch and burrow into the soft inner core of the elderberry stem. The larvae later pupate into adult beetles that burrow out of the plant.

The adult beetles continue to feed only elderberry plants, Souza said.

Souza found made his discovery while monitoring a conservation area full of elderberry plants that the Western Shasta Resource Conservation District (WSRCD) maintains for Shasta County. The county directed the patch of elderberry plants to be planted beside Knighton Road near Churn Creek in exchange for the loss of habitat caused by the construction of the Knighton Road bridge expansion that began in 1999.

The county contracted WSRCD to carry out the mitigative efforts for $300,000. Of which, the non-profit maintains a 15 percent overhead on projects, WSRCD Director Mary Mitchell said.

Proper mitigation in this case required 18 elderberry plants to be transplanted, and the planting of an additional 50 elderberry plants and 50 other native seedlings., according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The first 18 plant died, Mitchell said, adding that the district later "got good at maintaining elderberry plants."

"I think this is one of our greatest achievements," Mitchell said of the district. We've proven our ability to bring back a species so it can thrive."

If anyone wanted to raise elderberry trees to help beetle, Souza said that the tree is often found in people's yards. The "shrubby" tree has cream colored flowers and yields berries.