Stag beetles are spectacular insects, the knights of the beetle world, armoured and aggressive and utterly harmless to humans. New Zealand has a few species, mostly small and secretive. But there used to be a giant. A stag beetle the length of your thumb, with jaws longer than its head, a metallic green body that gleamed in the sun, a creature that belonged in a fairy tale. It was the canopy phantom, and it is gone. Male stag beetles use their mandibles to fight over mates – grappling, lifting, flipping each other off logs. The giant forest beetle had mandibles that curved like a stag's antlers, studded with small teeth, powerful enough to lift a rival off its feet. They were not for eating – adult stag beetles feed on sap and nectar, using their smaller mouthparts for that. The jaws were for show, for combat, for impressing the ladies. And they were magnificent. It lived in the canopy and the rotting wood. Its grubs spent years – perhaps three, four, or five years – inside decaying logs, chewing through rotten wood, growing slowly, moulting again and again. They needed old-growth forest with large, rotting logs of native trees – kauri, rimu, tōtara. Without those logs, the grubs starved. The adults emerged in summer – usually after rain – flying heavily through the forest, searching for mates. They gathered on sap flows, drinking the sweet liquid, fighting, breeding. The females laid their eggs in rotting wood, and the cycle began again. Deforestation and introduced predators destroyed it. When Europeans cleared native forest for pasture and timber, they destroyed the giant beetle's nursery. No old logs, no grubs, no adults. The forests that remained were fragmented, too small, too young – the rotting logs were gone. At the same time, rats and pigs arrived. Rats climb. Rats chew. Rats eat grubs – fat, slow, protein-rich grubs hidden inside logs. Pigs root through the forest floor, smashing rotting logs to pieces, eating everything inside. A grub that spends five years growing inside a log is defenceless against a pig's snout. The smaller stag beetles survived. They can live in smaller logs, younger forests, more fragmented habitats. They are faster, more cryptic, less demanding. But the giant is extinct. A few pinned specimens in a museum drawer – their mandibles still gaping, their wing cases still gleaming faintly – are all that remain. The canopy phantom is a ghost because it was always phantom-like – seen rarely, glimpsed at dusk, a flash of metallic green disappearing into the canopy. Now there is nothing to glimpse. The forests are still there – some of them – but they are quieter, emptier, beetle-less. We cut down its trees. Then we wondered why it left.