Valley naturalists prowl insect trail
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For nearly two years, naturalists Charley Eiseman of Pelham and Noah Charney of Sunderland roamed the country in search of invertebrates. They traveled 15,000 miles to prepare a new guidebook, "Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates: A Guide to North American Species" (Stackpole Books).
What a long, strange and buggy trip it's been. And an ultimately triumphant one. Their 592-page volume, bursting with 1,000 color photos, was named best nature guidebook in this year's National Outdoor Book Awards contest.
Together, the work of the two men opens a window into a largely unseen world.
Eiseman, 32, earned a master's from the University of Vermont's Field Naturalist Program after attending the University of Massachusetts and works as a consultant, conducting plant and animal surveys for land trusts and the Massachusetts Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program. Charney, 31, a native of Tennessee, will be defending his doctoral dissertation in salamander ecology and genetics this month at UMass, where he is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and Switzer Environmental Fellow.
Together, they run a business called Northern Naturalists, offering programs and services, including workshops on animal tracking. They will speak Friday at 5:30 p.m. at Everyone's Books in Brattleboro, Vt. (For more information, visit www.everyonesbks.com.)
Eiseman and Charney, ever the team, took on questions jointly for this month's Environment section Q&A about the beetles, spiders, flies, ants, slugs and other invertebrates in their - and our - lives.
Q: What did you feel was missing in existing guides to your subject?
A: There are lots of guides to insects out there, but to our knowledge this is the first book devoted to the things they leave behind. Before our book was published, there was nowhere to turn with questions like "What made this cocoon?" "Whose eggs are these?" "Which spider made this web?" and so on.
Q: Can you give an example of the complex insect behaviors you have uncovered?
A: One of our favorite insect stories to tell is that of the viceroy butterfly, a familiar garden insect with some amazing and little-known behaviors. When it is young, the caterpillar ties its droppings together with silk to form a long poop-stick ("frass chain") projecting from the edge of a leaf, onto which the caterpillar retreats to hide from predators. In the fall, the caterpillar constructs a cleverly suspended leaf-and-silk house in which it rides out the winter. As a caterpillar, the viceroy mimics a bird dropping, and as a butterfly, it mimics the poisonous monarch. You can find viceroy poop sticks and overwintering houses on willows and poplars throughout the Pioneer Valley.
Q: What can we learn from paying attention to the invertebrates that live among us?
A: When we take a closer look, we discover ingenious and unlikely survival strategies, some of which produce intricate works of art. It is fascinating to learn about the interrelationships among species, and the extreme specificity of many invertebrate behaviors and food choices.
Q: Name a few invertebrates that can be difficult - but exciting - to find here in the Pioneer Valley?
A: We were excited to find the egg sacs of a bolas spider dangling from a twig at the Montague Plains. This is a mostly southern spider that "fishes" for moths at night by dangling a silk line with a sticky droplet at the end that mimics moth pheromones.
Often, though, rather than looking for signs of rare insects, we get excited about finding difficult-to-observe signs of common insects. Green lacewing eggs, for instance, are amazing little structures that are rarely noticed but are very common. Once you train your eyes to look, you start seeing them all around. During our 15,000-mile journey across the country writing the book, we played a game every time we got out of the car. The goal was to see who could be the first to find the green lacewing eggs. Almost always, one of us would find one within a few minutes wherever we went.
We also get excited when we come across complex interactions between multiple insects, like the other day when we found leaves that leafcutter bees had stuffed in the exit holes of a black-and-yellow mud dauber nest on the side of a Yale University building where we were about to give a presentation.
Q: Which species leave the most obvious trails to follow? And which the least?
A: We aren't typically trailing insects in the way you might think of trailing a large mammal through the snow in hopes of glimpsing the creature. Instead, we find scattered signs of our quarry, usually in forms other than footprints. However, if you can find the right substrate - the best is a dusty road in the silty soil of a river terrace - the tracks of every beetle, spider, and ant show up beautifully. In one case we even saw a mite making visible tracks.
Q: Did you encounter any unusual challenges during your research for this book?
A: The whole premise of this project was a challenge that no one in his/her right mind would have attempted: starting with minimal knowledge of entomology, we gave ourselves a year and a half to put together a guide that covers all of North America and tries to do justice to documenting the natural history of tens of thousands of species of invertebrates. There are still many signs - such as distinctive aquatic eggs and fancy delicate cocoons - for which we have not yet identified the species responsible.
Q: Do you believe invertebrates fail to get the respect they deserve, even from environmentalists?
A: Yes, it's frustrating to see people have irrational phobias of "bugs," squishing them indiscriminately, completely unaware of the beauty and complexity of their lives. They are incredibly understudied given their abundance and ecological significance. The sophistication of their behaviors is often not widely known. In giving presentations across the country, we always find that many people had no idea that insect behaviors can be so complex. It's humbling.
It is sometimes difficult to get many people to want to hear us speak about insect tracks. Presumably they assume the subject will be uninteresting and irrelevant. Yet, when they actually show up to one of our talks, we've found that most people are blown away by what they learn. Several people have told us that the perspective we have provided has dramatically changed the way they see the world. As with any subject, when we slow down and pay careful attention, there is much to learn about ourselves and about the universe through tracking insects.
Q: How do you hope your book will be used?
A: We hope people will use it to gain a deeper knowledge and appreciation of the creatures living right under their noses. We hope it will expand our awareness of our place in this world, and of ourselves. We see great possibility for the use of our book for mentoring children. Many outdoor educators tell us that students often bring them strange objects like cocoons and egg sacs, and the teachers have no reference for identifying these objects. We have spent many productive hours simply staring at walls of buildings looking for insect signs - we did this everywhere we traveled in researching the book, and we continue to do this everywhere we go to speak about it. This activity could easily translate to a classroom setting: have children poke around intently in one small corner of the schoolyard or building exterior, and they're bound to come up with something made by an invertebrate. It is a good way to train the observation skills.
Q: What does it mean to you to win recognition from the National Outdoor Book Awards?
A: It is a welcome validation of our efforts. Of course, the concept of following bug tracks seems completely ludicrous. But insects are so abundant, and the exquisite, mysterious objects they leave behind are so commonplace that it seems equally ludicrous that most of us naturalists had no sense of what all these little objects were before this book was available. We see winning the award as recognition that our book contributes an essential and unique resource to curious and observant naturalists.
For more information, visit www.northernnaturalists.com.
