By Elizabeth Bernays
“Why didn’t you study something interesting, like dolphins or elephants?” Linda kept asking in the months after I met her. I always laughed. How could I easily explain to my unschooled lover why insects were so fascinating and why I became an entomologist? Why my desert home means so much to me. If she saw a bug she would stamp on it, then point to the dead insect, “What’s that?” One mosquito bite drives her crazy. Anything that can bite is attracted to her. “What the fuck got me this time? Look at my bite with a telescope.” It was her joke name for my Opti visor.
As far back as I can remember insects had been interesting, even the blood-feeders whose bites rarely bothered me. Texas Linda didn’t believe me when I first told her we didn’t have window screens in my Queensland childhood home and mosquitoes were always in swarms under the dining table and under the bed. She did laugh though, when I told her that my brother Barton and I had competitions on who could kill the most mosquitoes at dinner. We made little piles of corpses beside our plates, while our father laughed, undercutting Mother’s sense of propriety.
Still, Linda liked butterflies and southern Arizona has the greatest diversity of them. In my desert preserve we watched the common black and blue Battus swallowtails laying eggs on the red-brown leaves of their hostplant, Aristolochia. Then, as the eggs hatched into bright red caterpillars they finished chewing up the plant and wandered off, looking for more.
“Fuck, Babe, they really going to find food? They’s no more plants here.”
“They’re really good at finding their special plant.” We found a specimen of the rather cryptic plants just a few yards away.
“Well why’s they red, you’d think birds’d see them easily.”
“It is interesting—these guys feed only on that special plant and it’s got poisons the caterpillars like. They keep all the poisons in their bodies and that protects them from predators.”
“Cool.”
From then on, Linda had an eye out for both the caterpillars and the butterflies. “Battus,” she would call, “Battus over there.” She learned all the common butterfly species – painted ladies, queens, Gulf fritillaries, citrus swallowtails. I loved to watch her looking out for anything new, those shapely brown boy legs in baggy boys’ shorts wandering among the desert plants, her quick eyes spotting them from a distance. Her fast her brain combined with an inability to pay attention for long somehow worked for observing the fleeting activities of butterflies.
We both like painted ladies best. Black and orangey brown with white spots, they are easy to identify and sometimes there are swarms of them. In spring we found a few of their caterpillars on a thistle plant. Dark and covered with soft little projections, they had constructed a house by weaving together a few leaves so that the treacherous spines pointing outwards would repel their ant predators.
“How do they know to do that?”
“They’re programmed. The ones that are good at it live to make babies, the others are likely to get eaten so the good builders produce more good builders.”
“Wow Babe, you studied these things?” Her little brown face looked at me with wide eyes as the sun shining on her black buzz cut reminded me of woolly bear caterpillars with their fuzz of black hairs.
I smiled and told her about my student, Dana. “He found that painted ladies migrate north from Mexico in spring and lay eggs on thistles in Arizona where ants are their biggest problem, and the ants have trouble getting to the caterpillars in their armed houses. When these caterpillars become butterflies, they continue north and use lupins for food and get protection because of the poisons in lupin leaves. Birds are their main enemies in Washington, and they don’t like the taste of lupin-filled caterpillars.”
“Well! They do different things in different places?”
After a butterfly childhood I had a break from anything entomological as I went through bohemian years and youthful travels, but I eventually returned to insects, obtaining higher degrees at the University of London. There, I met Reg, my life’s soulmate. As one of England’s big names in entomology he was writing The Insects: Structure and Function which would ultimately make him famous. I became his principal reader and we spent many happy hours discussing how to make all the physiology accessible yet accurate. With his flat face, large mole on one cheek and slightly prognathous jaw he was rather odd looking but his quiet enthusiasm totally charmed me, so I loved his appearance also.
During our first months as lovers, I spent evenings making an index for the 800-page book while he was teaching. I wrote down words and page numbers from the first printed copy on a hundred sheets of lined paper spread out over the floor. Our many years together were lives of shared research, love of music and literature, and total understanding. After he died it was Linda who raised me out of despair and misery. I became enchanted with her light hearted humor, invented words and phrases, and an uneducated background that contrasted so strongly with mine. It made me smile too that my mother would not have approved! Best of all was Linda’s increasing engagement with natural history, including an interest in the six-legged creatures that had made my career.
At the beginning of summer in Tucson, many moths and beetles emerge from their winter hiding places and most of them fly at night. We saw an elf owl catch moths on the patio. We found moths at the lights above doors and even on the uncovered windows, and in the mornings we found the last moths resting on the outside walls. I arranged for us to go with my avid insect-collector friend, Margaret, on a “black light” trip to look at more of them.
After dark, Margaret erected a large white sheet that hung vertically in a clearing in the mountains south of Tucson. The “black-light” is a special bulb that sends out UV light as well as visible light, and this attracts a lot more insects than an ordinary incandescent one. She had a generator and pointed the light towards the sheet. It didn’t take long for the first arrivals.
“Oh, look at that beautiful geometrid moth,” called Margaret, pointing to a delicate green moth with white lines across its wings.
“Oh yeah, Nemoria obliqua I think,” called one of the other entomologists.
I was surprised when a border patrol van came by without even stopping. Margaret smiled, “They never stop. They’re used to us entomologists with our black lights.”
Next came the hawk moths, mostly the white-lined sphinx, and a host of smaller moths, some of them very pale and delicate. Linda was speechless as hoards of moths accumulated on the sheet and a couple of other collectors with us took their pick, pushing their favorites into vials. But Margaret was most interested in beetles and they came a bit later.
“Oh that’s a looker,” Linda shouted as the first big green scarab beetle arrived. The shiny fig-eaters plopped heavily onto the sheet by the dozen and crawled all over it, disturbing the smaller moths. Linda couldn’t take her eyes off the entomological mass, with all their colors and different sizes and shapes. By eleven, the sheet was covered with a vast array of moths, bugs, beetles, and other insects. It was heaven for the insect collectors and Linda gazed at the sheet, “Wow, just wow!”
But it wasn’t the end. The very late arrivals were giant silk moths that seemed to just float into the light and gently land on top of the mass. They were Polyphemus moths, five inches in wingspan. The beige background color was interrupted by a black band and a multicolored central eyespot on each wing. One was a male as demonstrated by the very feathery antennae containing the organs for smell to detect the female sex pheromones. No one spoke. It was a moment of absorption in nature’s glory; so many, so varied, so beautiful, and almost no part of the sheet uncovered. Linda turned to me with a grin. “They’s fucking amazing Babe.”
Back at my desert home Linda began looking with new eyes. She found the scarlet bugs that suck young mesquite shoots and shot photos of them. Then the milkweeds were fascinating with red bugs sucking the seeds, queen butterflies at the flowers, and the orange aphids clustered around the flowers buds. She was naturally observant and had taken to the idea of insects.
When we found a dead Cooper’s hawk Linda commanded, “Oh pick that up, I gotta have them feathers.”
I laughed. “You pick it up if you want them so badly,”
Together we put the body on the flat roof of my house in the desert. Then we dragged a wheel barrow up the steps to the roof and inverted it over the hawk to prevent scavengers from stealing it. After it dried out we put it in a paper bag in the laundry and forgot about it. Months later, horror! Linda opened the bag and out flew a lot of drab little moths from among the dust of half-eaten feathers.
“Oh Babe, you’s the biologist, you let this happen!”
“Sorry Bub, but it is really interesting. These tineid moths are important for breaking down this kind of stuff. Think natural recycling.”
She looked sadly at the mass of half feathers. “At least we can get the skull.” And it became an addition to her skull collection.
Linda is not a morning person but on one occasion I got her to walk out in the desert early, after a night of rain. It is a time full of biological wonders in the place I call home. Thousands of leaf-cutter ants were swarming—black insects swirling in dense columns ten and twenty feet high. As we walked along the winding road we saw more of them, perhaps a swarm every thirty yards, the distant ones like plumes of smoke rising from the creosote bushes.
“Look Bub, they’re paired up in the swarm.”
“Fuck! Yeah.”
And as we watched, males captured females and they fell together to the ground, creating a seething mass of black sex life on the moist desert earth below, shedding their wings as they crawled about. Linda bent to look closer at the frantic activity.
“See the females, digging to make new nests?” I pointed at one already half buried.
“What happens to the boys?”
“They just die. The girls will be queens. They carry fungus, and in the new nest they will plant it so that it grows and provides the new colony with food.”
“They lay eggs down there?”
“Sure, hundreds. And those eggs hatch into worker ants that tend the queen and fertilize the fungus garden.”
“Very cool.”
As we turned for home the swarms were all grounded. Quail and cactus wrens pecked crazily at them for breakfast.
The next spring when Palo Verde trees were flowering we watched another part of the leaf cutter ant story. Yellow trails of fallen flowers led away from the trees.
“See how worker ants are carrying them along a path to the underground nests? They drop some on the way and that creates a trail. Worker ants nourish the fungus gardens with chewed-up petals.”
I wondered aloud, “How many people know that beneath their feet, perhaps six yards down, a colony of millions, in thousands of chambers, have an egg-laying queen, and a monster fungus garden? That they live in a space the size of a house, and dozens of such colonies occur in just an acre!”
Linda was impressed, “I love you Babe, you just love this shit eh?” But there was a limit to how much detail she wanted to absorb before something else caught her attention. Look there’s a pepla bird up in that tree.
Linda’s fascination with the newness of the Sonoran Desert surrounding my house quickly evolved. It became so much more than just a place where things stick into skin, or sting, or bite. It made me love her more; Linda, the fascinating, intermittent sweetheart in my house becoming a naturalist, an entomologist even.
There were times, of course, when insects took second place. We were at a dude ranch where masses of yuccas plants were in flower and I looked in some of the white bell-shaped blooms looking for the famous yucca moths. Their story can be found in every book on pollination or co-evolution and I had once spent days chasing yuccas for visiting Chinese colleagues who were desperate to see the moths.
“Look Bub, these little white guys make neat bundles of pollen with their front legs and actually pollinate flowers by putting the little ball of pollen on a new flower by hand.” But Linda took no notice. She was focused on horses. We galloped across the yucca-covered desert and along the dry washes, scaring the occasional jack rabbits that leapt away like small deer.
“Love the horsies Babe,” shouted Linda above the wind and thumping of horses hooves.
“Love the yuccas too,” I called back.
At my home in the desert, my private nature preserve, our lives became bound together with love for all that we could watch and imagine, learn about and listen to. A new bird call, a new javelina sighting, a bobcat bringing its young, a desert spiny lizard pumping up and down, a Gulf fritillary butterfly laying eggs on passion vine. With insects now a part of the repertory we were often bent over looking at small ones: harvester ants carrying seeds to their nests, assassin bugs sucking the juice out of a small caterpillar.
We did get mosquitoes occasionally and as soon as Linda saw one on her bare leg she successfully slapped it dead, “Look, blood. That’s my blood. Well let’s look at the damn sucker.”
I took out my old microscope and showed her how to adjust the focus and distance between the eyepieces.
“Long stripey legs Babe.”
“Look at the front end, the tiny head.”
“Yeah, he’s got feelers.”
“It’s a girl. Only the girls have that proboscis that digs into you with that long thin thing coming down from its head. It’s six tiny flexible needles. Two of them do the sawing into you and two of them make a kind of straw to suck the blood.”
“No wonder them fuckers kill me.”
As I studied for a Master of Fine Arts in writing after life as an entomologist, Linda met my teachers in the English Department and came to the parties. With her new-found enthusiasm for insects and other wild animals though, Linda was thrilled to also meet my biology colleagues. Alex was a favorite. This handsome Russian not only studied all the animals in the desert but was a famous wildlife photographer and kindly spent time with her as she photographed a great-horned owl family in a Tucson palm tree. She worked for months until the chicks finally left the nest. We keep up with Alex and often check the spectacular photography at his website.
We visited Dan working in the Santa Rita Mountains on butterflies, and one of his students squatting by an Ambrosia plant proceeded to tell us about the chemicals in the plant and exactly how the caterpillars metabolized them. As we moved on Linda said, “Did you get all that? I heard blah blah blah.”
Nancy talked about the aphids living in globular galls at the bases of cottonwood leaves, and how the youngest offspring become little soldiers defending the rest of the colony from a small hole in the gall. Steve talked about his bees, Noah his Drosophila flies, and visitors from round the world who came to stay with me in Tucson were a constant source of interest.
Thomas from Germany came to work with me and one of my students on tiger moth caterpillars and how they taste and sequester the special chemicals they need to protect themselves from predators. It was a project I continued working on as I wrote my stories. Linda had earlier helped me collect the caterpillars but she was most fascinated by Thomas’s German University title of “Professor Doctor.” Linda began calling me “Professor Doctor,” and when she discovered I had two doctorates, it became “Professor Doctor Doctor.” It always made her laugh.
Among my emails one morning came a notice that the celebrated Professor Bert Hölldobler was to visit the University of Arizona and show his prize-winning documentary about ants. Linda was as enthusiastic as I was and we arrived on campus with time to spare. It was Linda’s first visit to a university.
“I am on campus! And look at you—strutting around the minute you put one foot on university ground.” Linda laughed with exaggerated swaggering as she looked back at me. She was in excited mode and I smiled at her imagination; no one strutted less than I did.
We found the big room with a screen at one end and the crowd that had already assembled, but we got seats near the front. Bert was up on the stage and saw me. He waved calling out, “Hi Liz.”
Linda was overjoyed. “I’m with her,” she said jokingly to the people around us.
I smiled and took her hand as we readied for the movie.
It was full of extraordinary details of ant life, but at one point a cell phone rang and Bert was furious. “Who is that?”
A small gray-haired lady, who turned out to be his wife, stood up and said softly, “It’s your phone dear,” as she quickly turned it off. The tittering was brief and the moment passed, but not before Linda had concocted a story about the phone to tell later. Funniest god-damn thing.
At the end of the documentary Linda turned to me with shining eyes, “We gotta get a copy of that Babe, it’s so amazing I want to watch it over again.”
When Linda was away I often sat among the saguaros and let the sound of mourning doves become part of my sadness as I deliberated on the past—its intellectual and emotional opulence with a soulmate who died too soon. How in the laboratory, we learned the way locusts control their food intake. How in India we watched pest caterpillars on Sorghum crops and discovered that leaf surface wax in resistant varieties contained chemicals that altered their behavior, making them toss their lives away into the breeze instead of climbing down into the heart of the plant to eat. How we discovered the way a colorful grasshopper in Nigeria avoided being poisoned by the cyanide as it fed on the cassava crop. We puzzled over insect physiology questions as we drank our late night pints of warm beer at the “Carpenter’s Arms” in London, and finally, drank our morning tea as we sat on our Tucson patio and watched the Harris hawks catch a cottontail rabbit.
In my new life my sweetheart had taken on desert life including insects, the entomologist herself, and now the writer she would often find sitting at a computer. Linda would comment, “You with your pearls of wisdom on your oyster tongue.” My entomological life in Tucson and around the world became subjects for creative nonfiction I wrote for my new degree. Linda read several of the essays and pointed out some problems. “Whatcha mean here?”
As some of my thesis chapters were published, Linda would hug me. “You’s my special professor doctor doctor (but not a real one) and I loves you.” At the resort where she lived part time I sometimes visited and she would say to her neighbors there, “Hi, this my friend, she’s a bug professor.” The stories I had written about life with insects eventually became a book published as Six Legs Walking: Notes from an Entomological Life, enabling Linda to say, “You’s a entomologist and a writer.!”
We sat on my patio on a warm dark summer evening enjoying the sound of distant coyotes, and the faint fluttering of Mexican long nosed bats at the hummingbird feeder. I thought back to the joint love of insect biology with an adored colleague and how automatically we shared a fascination with the lives and workings of the most diverse group of animals. With Linda the interest had grown over time and I had the thrill of being an advocate, a teacher, and admirer of her new-found enthusiasm. Linda said, “Babe, I love you and I just love your place, your desert sanctuary.” It was all I needed to have my lover feel as I did about my home in the richest desert and with the greatest insect diversity of anywhere I had known.
Elizabeth Bernays grew up in Australia, became a British Government Scientist in London, a Professor in Berkeley, and Regents' Professor at the University of Arizona. She has published forty nonfiction stories and her memoir, Six Legs Walking, won the 2020 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award.