100th Post: Meet Abigail Parker

I wanted to find a subject worthy of my 100th post to this blog, and I think I have one: My wonderful friend Abigail Parker. Abby is a highly intelligent and creative woman who has become a very respected authority on lady beetles (familyCoccinellidae) of North America. I finally had the pleasure of meeting her in person in south Texas last month.

We had known each other for a long while via Bugguide.net, but it turns out Abigail is very knowledgeable about most natural history subjects. She taught me several birds during the Texas trip. I would not have recognized this Willet, for example, had she not told me what it was.

Her enthusiasm and patience are remarkable, especially considering that she battles medical issues that would leave most of us indoors whining and complaining at a minimum. The heat and humidity of Brownsville and Mission will leave the healthiest person exhausted, but Abby was a real trooper.

One of the things I love most about Abigail is that she maintains a “sense of wonder” and awe that most scholars lose along the way in academia. She’s quick to ask that you not be in awe of her own Yale education, but her friendly and conversational personality put you at ease anyway.

Our mutual friend Mike Quinn invited us to join him, and his colleagues, for blacklighting in the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge. This was Abigail’s first time doing this kind of thing and she was in wonderland! It was great to see her enjoying herself, her friends, and the myriad of insects that flocked to the lights.

In “real life,” Abby lives with her husband in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she also works for a small publishing company. Her interests beyond birds and ladybugs extend to gems and tarot cards. She is also a talented artist, as any visit to her Facebook page or Flickr photostream will reveal. She also has her own blog, ”Butterfly Psyche”, that you might check out.

During the Texas trip I was honored to treat Abby to a birthday dinner at a sushi restaurant in Mission. We both got “dressed up” and had a great time. I learned a good deal about sushi, too! There seems to be no limit to Abigail’s passions, knowledge, and achievements. Keep it up, Abby, and know you have many friends who care about you.

Meet Mary Jane

I owe a big thank you to my friend Joshua Stuart Rose for suggesting that I become friends with Mary Jane Epps via Facebook. Mary Jane (“MJ”) is currently a PhD student here at the University of Arizona. She came to know Josh when they were undergrads in biology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She is a wonderful young lady with many talents and an endless fascination for the natural world.

I got to meet her in person last week when we made a spontaneous half-day journey up the Mount Lemmon Highway in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. She was due to leave in two days for her “field season” in southwest Virginia and wanted to make a quick getaway here before she left. I was honored to join her.

MJ grew up in Virginia with a brother, sister, and parents who both teach at the University of Virginia. She decided to attend Duke in part to avoid student-teacher conflicts with mom and dad, but she also has a great love of the longleaf pine forests of the Carolinas. No matter where she goes, MJ excels in academics. She recharges her batteries by literally “fiddling around.” She is an accomplished musician who jams with friends playing traditional Appalachian music as well as a bit of bluegrass here and there.

There are many qualities I admire in Mary Jane, not the least of which is that she takes initiative in meeting other people. She has a warm smile and friendly personality that is instantly disarming. It is impossible not to feel relaxed and welcome in her presence.

She also uses all of her senses to familiarize herself with the flora and fauna wherever she finds herself. She reawakened my own sense of smell by crushing leaves to help her identify a particular plant and then sharing the scent with me. She literally looks closely at the tiniest of organisms, carrying a magnifying loop and using it liberally, like here in Molino Canyon last Wednesday during our outing together.

Mary Jane is studying the relationship between fungi and beetles (the beetles to be found in mushrooms for example), and is two years into what she expects will be at least a four year doctoral thesis project. She told me she dissected over 1,500 tiny rove beetles (family Staphylinidae) to identify them to species by differences in their genitalia. I told her I would have just handed her the degree already. That is the kind of dedication she applies to her passions. I can only imagine what her musical talents must be like.

I’m already looking forward to spending more time afield with MJ when she returns here in the fall. Meanwhile, I wish her well with her studies.

Meet Margarethe Brummermann

If there is one person in Tucson who has single-handedly made my life here a true joy, then it is Dr. Margarethe Brummermann. We met through that wonderful social network known as BugGuide, when she began posting insect images to that site. There is much more to Margarethe than just insects, though, and I have enjoyed learning about her former adventures while sharing in some of her new ones.

Margarethe actually lives just outside of Tucson, west and north of the city in Picture Rocks, on the other side of the Tucson Mountains. She lives in a very nice home with her husband, Randy, and a “pack” of five dogs: Montana (“Tana”), Cody, Leika, Frodo, and Bilbo (plus two cats, Boris and Natasha, named of course for the villainous duo in Rocky and Bullwinkle).

They have neighbors, but houses here are widely scattered by city standards, and there is lots of space around their residence. Plus, they are adjacent to state rangelands where cattle graze, coyotes roam, and rattlesnakes are common. It is an austere but scenic landscape, save for a vast mountain of rubble from the nearby quarry.

Indoors, Margarethe’s passions are evident in every room in the house. While she has degrees in zoology and vertebrate physiology, she is also an accomplished and popular artist. Working mostly in watercolor, she paints everything from pets to western life and landscapes. She erects a booth in several outdoor art shows and festivals each year, and her work also hangs in local galleries. She has also done commissioned work.

The last couple of years, Margarethe has created a new project for herself: documenting in digital images the many colorful and unique beetles of Arizona. She shoots images in the field, but also brings specimens home to photograph on a clean white background to bring out the finer details and truer colors of her subjects. Her intention is to publish a “coffee table book” with plates of her images and a brief explanatory text. She has already had interest from publishers; and her latest count is over 800 species of Coleoptera she has imaged.

German by birth, Margarethe has traveled the world and done field research on a wide array of animals. Her stories are vivid and entertaining, as well as educational, and she shares them freely when we take day trips together out of town. She is not above poking fun at me, too, but she’s endlessly patient with my quirks and tolerant and forgiving of my sometimes irresponsibly slower pace in the field.

One of the many joys we have is introducing each other to other entomologists, insect enthusiasts, and wildlife photographers here in Arizona. We often go together to gatherings like the annual “Beetle Bash” hosted by Fred and Carol Skillman at their home in the Dragoon Mountains; and Pat Sullivan and Lisa Lee in Sierra Vista who have recently started holding an annual “Infestation” of entomologists at their own residence.

I can honestly say that my life would be a great deal poorer for not knowing Margarethe and Randy, and certainly a lot duller without our regular excursions away from the city and into the lovely canyons and mountains. Scenic landscapes, incredible fauna and flora, and great company: Who could ask for more? Thank you, Margarethe!

NOTE: You will want to follow Margarethe’s adventures, observations, and passions for yourself at her new blog, Arizona: Beetles, Bugs, Birds and More.

Leigh Anne DelRay

I recently met a person so exceptional that she deserves to be featured in both of my blogs, just to make sure you can’t avoid getting to know her. We met via (what else) the Bugguide.net website where she has started submitting images. While she is a certified animal enthusiast, from the feathered and two-legged to the hairy and eight-legged, her passion for life and art is contagious.

Leigh Anne has endured serious tragedy and drama in her life, but you wouldn’t know it from her affectionate, sunny disposition and creative and intuitive personality. She has a way of turning her experiences into a shared tapestry through her evocative photography skills and choice of subjects. Many of her images literally bring me to tears, but Leigh Anne recognizes the power of imagery and uses it to remind us that places, people, and stories are worth knowing, if only briefly.

One of Leigh Anne’s favorite pursuits is hunting meteorites. It has been a real education for me to learn just how popular a “hobby” this is, and the great value, both scientific and monetary, that is attached to “space rocks.” She recently invited me to a party at her employer’s house to watch the television debut of Meteorite Men, featuring her boss, Geoff Notkin, and his teammate Steve Arnold. Who knew Kansas was such a mecca for meteorites? About 30-40 friends of Geoff’s were packed into his living room, riveted to the TV screen, tuned to the Discovery Science Channel. A fun time was had by all, and I thank Leigh Anne for continuing to introduce me to more fascinating people. I’m not the most sociable sort, but she may change that.

Leigh Anne is well-traveled, too, and embraces all that a given location has to offer. While she was in Los Angeles she successfully auditioned as an extra in several films and popular television shows. For example, she was a patient with a broken leg on an episode of ER, and stood in line behind leading man Kevin Costner in the airport scene in the movie Dragonfly (alas she was left on the cutting room floor in that one). That kind of spontaneity speaks to her adventurous nature.

I should really let Leigh Anne’s work speak for itself, so I encourage you to visit her website, Callisto Images, and see if you, too, are not moved by her profound vision, the intimacy of her subjects, and the playfulness that she expresses. Thank you, Leigh Anne, for helping me re-awaken to the depth of life around us, and reminding me to “live in the moment.” Oh, and lest one get the wrong impression, Leigh Anne is with another wonderful gentleman who is a gifted woodworker and a caring, upstanding individual in his own right.

Meet the Boettners

One of the great joys of entomology is getting to know other entomologists and their families. I was happily surprised to get a phone call from George “Jeff” Boettner recently, informing me that he and his wife were in Tucson to visit an in-law. Purely by chance, Jeff had met another friend of mine, Philip Kline, atop a butte on the edge of town. Philip mentioned that I lived in the city below, and suggested to Jeff that he look me up.

Jeff is a first-rate research entomologist at the University of Massachusetts where he studies tachinid flies and their hosts. His work has revealed startling evidence that exotic tachinids imported to combat invasive species like the gypsy moth have made a significant and terrible impact on both our native moths and our native species of tachinids. So effective are these introduced “generalist” tachinids that they outcompete the natives for hosts, driving them to extremely low population levels. Some endemic tachinid species may even be extinct, at least north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Cynthia, Jeff’s wife, is a fine biologist in her own right, and is the Coordinator of the Invasive Plant Control Initiative at the Silvio O. Conte National Fish & Wildlife Refuge. She also helped found the New England Invasive Plant Group (NIPGro for those who like acronyms). This year she and Jeff will celebrate their twenty-ninth (29th!) wedding anniversary. They complement each other wonderfully, and are great company over dinner and in the field, as I came to find out last Thursday evening and Friday. Thank you, Jeff and Cynthia, for a terrific time at the Blue Willow and in Madera Canyon.