Bug Walk

Sierra, March, 2001 by Blair Tindall

FIND ME SOME BUGS. AND MAKE SUITE THEY HAVE SIX LEGS!" bellows Stanford University ecologist Nate Sanders. Ten ninth-graders from East Palo Alto, California, scatter across the San Francisco peninsula grasslands, swatting each other with butterfly nets. A girl looks at her watch in misery, but two boys race off gleefully. "I got one, I got one!" yells Miguel Chavez, clad in baggy rip-stop pants, a mesh "Mexico" jersey, and a red and green bandanna stretched across his forehead. Something blue-green flails in the net as he hands it over. "Ooh, a dragonfly," says Nate, inspecting the five-inch iridescent creature through the gauze. "This guy is one of the oldest members of the whole insect world. To catch a dragonfly, that's really nice."

Miguel blushes. The insect buzzes helplessly as Nate pulls it out of the net, holding it high, explaining how its dome-shaped eyes almost wrap around its head for peripheral predator vision. He asks two girls to come closer. The taller one wrinkles her nose and recoils. "That's not close," says Nate.

Though he's 27, Nate shares their childlike fascination--though not their revulsion--with bugs. Growing up on an Arkansas farm without cable TV or video games, he was shooed outside for entertainment. Ranging through the woods in search of big adventure--mountain lions and grizzly bears--he became obsessed with the tiny, bizarre world of insects instead. As the kids look closely at the dragonfly, Nato happily watches tough teenage attitudes slip away and a whole new sense of discovery awaken, just as it had for him.

A shriek pierces the air. Hopping backward from a gnarled oak, Amber Bundy points down. "Catch it, catch it! It's a potato bug!" All bravado, Miguel rushes to her rescue, scooping up a three-inch, striped insect with threatening jaws and a large, baldish head that looks eerily human.

"We have a winner!" says Nate, holding up the burrowing insect unaccustomed to sunlight or an entomologist's affection, its spiny legs cycling in the air. "This is a Jerusalem cricket. If it were our size, this thing would belong in that bar full of aliens in Star-Wars." Nate sets the cricket down, and it immediately tunnels under the dirt.

"Every single person has to catch an insect and show it to me," commands Nate. "What makes an insect an insect? Are spiders insects? They have eight legs--so do ticks. Insects have six legs and three body parts--head, thorax, and abdomen. There are about 30 million species of insects in the world, a lot more than people--you should have no trouble finding one."

Miguel is off again, chasing something big and fast a hundred feet away. Five classmates follow. "Don't worry, it doesn't bite," says Nate, catching up. He looks more closely at the lizard. "Uh--it does bite. Do you have a glove?"

Miguel and Amber see no pretty dragonflies at home in East Palo Alto. An island of poverty in Silicon Valley only five miles from Stanford University, East Palo Alto lacks even a public high school. While elaborate stucco walls hide verdant backyard gardens in Palo Alto, rusty chain-link fences guard untended patches of soil in much of East Palo Alto, its arid atmosphere of dilapidated homes and liquor stores distant from the bustle and beauty of a forest ecosystem.

In a city where only one in three kids graduates from high school, Eastside College Preparatory School opened in 1996 to provide a rigorous, tuition-fee education to 105 students. Its earth-science class visits Stanford's nearby 1,200-acre Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve eight times a year, studying a different aspect of nature each time. A grant from the Community Foundation Silicon Valley covers transportation, lunches, educational supplies, and stipends for teaching assistants like 20-year-old Stanford junior Zoe Bradbury, who masterminded these Jasper outings so Eastside kids could learn firsthand how living things rely on each other. "We start with how everything depends on the soil, and get into biological interactions that way," says Zoe.

Today's trip is a bug walk, a hands-on hunt for creeping critters that makes the dynamics of an ecosystem clearer than any classroom lecture could. "It's humbling to learn how these little creatures you squish between your fingers have an enormous impact on ecosystems," laughs Philippe Cohen, director of Jasper Ridge, after a recent bug ramble. These miniature wilderness adventures are catching on across the country, providing a bug's-eye view to families and curious adults as well as inner-city teens, allowing even the eco-elite to shed their scientific demeanor while peering in the grass on their hands and knees. "The chance to poke around with a purpose is important for many adults who would otherwise feel too self-conscious," says Ron Lyons, who has "bugged" nine years at San Diego's Carpinteria State Beach. "And bug walks provide an opportunity for children to bring adults into their world."

At the Chicago Field Museum, bored birders are exploring the world another step down the food chain. In Lansing, Michigan, the Young Entomologists' Society offers bug walk how-to's, lesson plans, bug swaps, edible "insects" snacks like butterfly cookies, plus "Bugs on Wheels," a traveling minibeast zoo. North Carolina State University entomologist John Meyer uses bug walks to convert horticulture students who think the only good bug is a dead bug, and the Smithsonian's Gary Hevel gives racy prewalk talks about pheromone that get adults pretty excited "They actually pay for the experience," Hevel boasts.