Our boys have been at loose ends this week, with their travels over and school not yet started. They’ve fortunately managed to occupy themselves by searching for bugs, using a clear Tupperware container to catch them, a cloth-and-mesh bug house to hold them, and a National Audubon Society pocket guide to Insects and Spiders to identify them. They’ve turned up the usual bugs and beetles (centipedes, grasshoppers, katydids, spiders and the like) and have had one close call that I know of: a white-faced hornet that I quickly took from them and released. Their methods are haphazard but enthusiastic, and they’ve already learned to identify many more insects than they could a week ago.

The impetus for all this (aside from a boy’s natural interest in things that creep) was a cicada that we found in the backyard. At least, we now know it was a cicada: I couldn’t think what it was at the time. I also couldn’t find the Audubon book right then, so I turned to BugGuide.Net, where after some trial and error I was able to give it that name. Happily, I was also able to identify the unusual clawed “shell” I had found near my office, which turns out to have been the nympal shell molted by another cicada after emerging from its time underground: pairing the adult and shell together really made the boys want to learn more. (There are great images of a Tibicen lyricen emerging at BugGuide.Net here, and plenty of other pictures to fascinate the young naturalist.)

Watching the boys conduct their investigations, I must agree with the Audubon guide that “Getting to know [insects] will add interest to any walk outdoors and will increase your appreciation of other aspects of nature, since these tiny creatures have a great influence on the trees, flowers, and wildlife around them.” Online resources such as BugGuide.net and WhatsThatBug.com can only add to that appreciation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 24th, 2005 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.