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The presence on St. Helena of a hoopoe, a bird characteristic of grassland, glades, or open forest, is another argument against the island's having been entirely covered with heavy forest in pre-European times.
The fairly rich fauna of terrestrial invertebrates on St. Helena would have provided forage for U. antaios. Among this fauna, St. Helena can boast the world's largest earwig (Labidura herculeana, Dermaptera), which lives in burrows and under stones in dry soil and which attains a total length of at least 78 mm and probably more (Brindle, 1970). The very long probing bill of U. antaios would have been useful in preying on this species, and it takes no great imagination to envision the world's largest hoopoe conquering the world's largest earwig, thereby reversing the mythological order in having Antaios triumph over Hercules.