How I Came to Love Insects

I took this photo in Tortuguero N.P. in Costa Rica, January 2022. When I was younger I was more interested in landscapes; the older I get, the more interested I become in the little lives around us. This butterfly is called a “Crimson Patch” (Chlosyne janais).

I carry a hand lens everywhere these days.

The lens is for looking at small things, and especially insects.

The lens is also for giving. If I meet someone who has never looked through a hand lens, I often give them mine.

As the philosopher and writer Kathleen Dean Moore says, sometimes the most loving thing we can say is “Look.” To which I add: if you can help someone to see more clearly when they look, that can be an act of love as well.

My Bausch & Lomb hand lens that I carry everywhere. I’ve given away a lot of these.

I used to hate insects

When I was small, I hated bugs of all kinds. Insects, spiders, centipedes, and anything else that might crawl on my skin and bite or sting. That’s pretty natural, I think, and it’s a generally safe policy not to pick up wasps and spiders.

My friends, family, and neighbors taught me how to keep my home and garden free from undesirable bugs, too.

A neatly mowed lawn has fewer hiding places for spiders. Raking leaves and collecting fallen branches can keep ants and termites away from your home. Sprays can knock down a hornet nest from a safe distance. I grew up in the woods, so my teenage years involved a lot of hornet sprays, especially when I was working in home building and stone masonry.

Tiny bees on whorled milkweed. These bees don’t sting, and they’re so small you might think they are gnats. They’re great pollinators. I took this photo in the Prairie Restoration Garden my students and I built on our university campus. Mia Werger is the one chiefly responsible for this garden being built.

How I learned to appreciate insects

As a teenager, one of the things I loved to do after a day of carpentry or house painting was to head to the river for a swim and to catch fish.

Ironically, it did not occur to me to ask what the fish ate. I knew how to catch them with worms and lures and flies, but I knew very little about their natural food.

In graduate school I became a fly-fishing guide to help pay for my studies. As a guide I needed to learn more about the fish I loved. Where did they live? What were their life cycles like? What did they normally eat?