Bug Tracking
The Riekes Nature Department is on winter break, so I think this is a good time to post about fun Riekes Nature events that never made it onto the blog.
In the fall, Noah Charney came out to Hidden Villa to guide us in a bug tracking expedition. Noah and his associate Charley Eisman have written the book pictured at left. It’s titled, “Tracks & Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates,” and is an in-depth work on finding and identifying invertebrates by the signs they leave behind.
Why track bugs, you might ask. If you’re not a nature geek and don’t understand why looking for bug sign might foster deeper awareness and understanding of the myriad forms of life all around us, then here’s another reason: We got to notice and wonder about all the strange little things that our adult schedules usually force out of our awareness. We got to be curious kids again!
We gathered in Hidden Villa’s parking lot and didn’t have to go far for our bug hunt. We started by upending some furniture — namely, the picnic table that we’d all gathered around. It reminded me of constructing furniture forts as a kid, but with bigger toys. We explored the underside of the table and found at least 5 different signs of invertebrates.
My favorite (not pictured, none of the photos came out well) was a coccoon about 1/2 inch long, made of short yellowish hairs and lined with silk, with a neat circle cut out of one end. The hairs, it turned out, were the caterpillar’s own, shed to provide itself protection as it pupated into a moth. We were able to mentally match the cocoon with caterpillars that we’d seen crawling around, by remembering the color and length of the hairs on the living caterpillars.
Next we noticed the old, weathered logs that lined the parking lot. All the logs sported beautiful carved patterns, called galleries, made by both adults and larvae of particular bark beetle species. Noah showed us how to tell which species made the gallery by the pattern it carved out.
We wandered down to the creek in search of more moisture-loving invertebrates. Here we are investigating some green lacewing eggs, stuck to the bay tree’s leaves by long stalks. The eggs were so small that we could only see their details through a hand lens.
And, of course, the classic bug-hunting strategy of turning over rocks also yielded some interesting finds. Here a caddisfly is anchored alongside a clump of snail eggs.
These little constructions seemed to grow all over the buildings at Hidden Villa. Noah pointed out at least three seperate kinds of mud nests, made by three different species of wasp. The buildings with their many corners and crevices also yielded lots of kinds of web-weaving spiders, all identifiable by their webs, some crickets, coccoons of various sorts, and I’m sure many other signs of invertebrates that I’ve forgotten about. In fact, it seemed easier to find invertebrate signs on our constructed landscape rather than in a more “natural” setting.
One of our final but most interesting stops was this bin that held a couple of inches of water. The silt at the bottom had coalesced into long, narrow tracks that wound labyrinth-like around the bottom of the bin. As we watched, a translucent worm poked it’s head out of the end of one line of silt, grabbed another grain of silt, and placed it on the end of it’s own line, building up it’s protective silt tunnel just a little bit more.
I’d seen these patterns in the bottoms of rain buckets and other vessels left out in the wet. But I’d never even wondered at the pattern. Regarding the bin, Noah left us with one statement that will forever influence how I see and understand the world: Whenever you see any pattern on Earth, it’s most likely the work of a living thing.
