There was something glowing purple there, in the bright meadow by the river... I noticed it from afar when we were returning from a walk in the forest with our neighbor. You’re always in a hurry not to miss the right moments — such living miracles won’t wait long for you to get close to them, so I just ran towards it. In the flooded meadow, where a family of buffalo often rests and grazes, among the grass that had dried out in places from the heat, a large beetle was sitting on a long stalk. Massive and clumsy due to its excessively long, "frog-like" legs, it bent the blade of grass with its weight, waddled, and moved back and forth. But fortunately for us, it was in no hurry to fly away. I remembered that I had already seen similar beetles in other people’s photos; they are quite common in this region. But these were colorful insects of different shades of metallic green, blue, and shimmering reddish-gold. We came across an equally stunning beetle, reflecting the blue sky with its purple-metallic armor.

It was a frog-legged leaf beetle from the genus Sagra, as it turned out later. At that moment, Google helped me identify the beetle as Sagra buqueti, and it seems that none of the biologists objected to the correctness of the identification in the post under the photos on social media. Now, when the mini-painting has long been finished and I am talking about it here, doubts have arisen: more recent publications refer to this beetle as Sagra femorata. For the eye of an amateur entomologist, the subtle difference in the descriptions of these subgenera and species is hardly noticeable. Let this particular beetle keep "buqueti" in its name.