We spend a lot of time on this show talking about what we plant — the natives, the pollinator favorites, the plants that do the heavy lifting in a healthy garden. But today, I want to flip that around and talk about who’s actually using all that habitat that we work so hard to create. So joining me this week is award-winning science and nature writer and photographer Margie Patlak, the author of “Insect Safari: Exploring the Wondrous World of Everyday Bugs.”
The moment that sparked Margie’s interest in insects, and led to the publication of this book, occurred when she snapped a close-up photo of a bee in her own backyard. That single photo turned into a years-long obsession, cataloging and studying the insects living right under her nose, and honestly, right under all of ours.
Science and nature writer and photographer Margie Patlak’s new book is “Insect Safari: Exploring the Wondrous World of Everyday Bugs.” Photo Courtesy of Margie Patlak
What I love about this book is that Margie isn’t traveling to some exotic rainforest to find her subjects. She’s finding drama, beauty and genuinely wild behavior in the bugs living right in her own backyard, garden beds, and even flower pots on the city balcony. There’s a lot more going on in your backyard than you guessed: strange behaviors, hidden talents, and a few surprises even seasoned gardeners haven’t heard.
If you’ve ever wondered what’s really going on in the insect world quietly buzzing, crawling and flying through your own garden, this conversation is going to change how you look at it.
I loved this book and appreciated the ease of reading while still being interesting and informative — all the things you want out of a book. And it’s worth noting that Margie also took more than 60% of the book’s photographs herself.
Meet Margie Patlak
Margie has a bachelor’s degree in botany and master’s in environmental studies. She could have continued her studies and gone on to be a scientist, but she decided to pursue writing instead.
“Rather than just research the same thing for several years, I got impatient,” she says. “I wanted to learn about a lot of different things, so I decided I’d rather become a science writer and write about somebody else’s research than to continue to do my own.”
She had a college job writing about the university’s research, so she felt confident she could continue that kind of writing after earning her master’s.
“ But it turns out that all the jobs were in biomedical research. And so I ended up doing that for 30 years because I had a family to support.”
About 15 years ago, her family got a place in Maine where they spend their summers and falls, and she didn’t have any more college tuition to pay for, so she decided to pursue the kind of writing that she wanted to do.
“I was inspired by the nature around me and started doing nature writing. And I wrote a book called ‘More Than Meets The Eye: Exploring Nature and Loss on the Coast of Maine.’”
To help her with the creation of that book, she also revisited photography, something she had practiced in college, including a photojournalism class.
“ I started doing the photography in part just to remember images of what I wanted to write about,” she recalls.
She followed up that book with a photo book of Maine. She then switched gears again, beginning to work on “Insect Safari.”
Learning to Appreciate Insects
Before Margie began her work on “Insect Safari,” she wasn’t the biggest fan of bugs.
“I had the usual distaste for biting insects and fears of stinging insects, and I was a little put off by their alien features — their antennas and their hard segmented bodies and their bulgy eyes. And when you think about it, all the outer space aliens that are depicted in movies and cartoons, they have nearly all those insect features.”
Like most people, she wasn’t paying much attention to insects.
“ I just didn’t notice them,” she says. “I mean, here I was a nature writer, but I wasn’t paying attention to them, I think because they were so small and inconspicuous. And it really wasn’t until I learned about the honeybee colony collapse disorder several years ago and then predictions that there would be a broader insect apocalypse — because so many insect populations were declining in numbers — that I thought, ‘Wow, you know, this is a big chunk of nature that I should know more about.’”
Insects comprise three out of every four animal species on the planet, and between 10% and 40% of insect species worldwide are facing threat of extinction.
“I wanted to learn about them before they disappeared,” Margie says. “ I realized if I was more mindful of them, that I would be more motivated, hopefully, to protect them. Plus, my world would expand immensely because all of a sudden I would be more aware of all these critters around us.”
Twelve-spotted dragonfly on an old plant stem.
Photo Courtesy of Margie Patlak
Citizen Science With iNaturalist
A very handy app for gardeners is iNaturalist, which benefits all of us who use it for identifying and logging the plants and insects we’ve found. It is equally valuable to the scientists that work with iNaturalist to identify where these insects are and where they are moving, because users have geolocated them.
Margie is hooked on iNaturalist. It has been an invaluable tool on her insect safaris.
“ Initially, they started off with me just trailing any flying insect that I saw going into my flowers because I wanted to see how many different bee species I could find in my garden because I learned that there were over 4,000 native bee species in North America,” she says.
When she caught up with the flying insect, she would photograph it with her iPhone and submit the photo to iNaturalist. Image recognition technology identifies the species in the photo, and experts corroborate it.
Goldenrod is a host plant for many insects and an important pollen source.
Photo Courtesy of Margie Patlak
Getting to Know Insects
Margie says once she got to know insects by name, she became curious about them.
“It turns out that what I thought were bees were often flower flies or were wasps or some other kind of insect,” she says. “And then I just kind of broadened my approach to take pictures of whatever insect I saw.”
She wanted to know what their lifestyles are like.
“We all know where bears go in winter, for example, or what lions eat or where baby birds nest, but most of us can’t answer these basic questions about the much more common insects that are all around us, and I was guilty as charged. So I just started to use my research skills that I honed as a science writer for so many years to comb the internet, and I read a lot of scientific papers and books, and I even took a few field study classes and had a lot of chats with entomologists who were very patient with me. And then what I learned flabbergasted me so much because these insects have these amazing superpowers and these unusual anatomies and intellectual abilities that nobody thought were possible. So I was so awestruck by what I was learning that I felt like most people didn’t know that I said, ‘I’ve gotta write a book and let everybody know about this.”
Before she started learning about individual insect species, she thought every orange and black butterfly was a monarch, she says. Then she discovered northern crescents, fritillaries, painted ladies and more.
She began to notice small bees, not just the easy-to-spot bumblebees. And she learned about the sweatbees and longhorn bees, the leaf miners and mason bees. And she learned about all different kinds of wasps and beetles that visited her flowers.
This made her realize how many insects rely on her flowers.
“ They were out there all the time gobbling up their nectar and pollen, and many more different kinds of insects than I expected,” she says. “Even the ones that are known for digesting dead wood in the forest and stuff were coming to my flowers because in their adult form they need nectar. It taught me a big lesson in that regard.”
Now, she’s turned into a self-proclaimed bug evangelist.
“Once I learned how amazing these critters were, I wanted to get other people to join me in protecting them,” she says.
A white-spotted flower fly on a daisy.
Photo Courtesy of Margie Patlak
Garden Practices That Help Insects
There are many things gardeners can do to provide for the basic needs of insects, such as food, shelter and a place to overwinter.
“A lot of insects overwinter under the protection of leaves, a layer of leaves,” Margie points out. “And some of them even wrap themselves up in leaves, like the beautiful luna moth wraps up its cocoon in leaves when it overwinters. So it’s really important to keep these leaves for the insects and not shred them or bag them up.”
At the end of the growing season, Margie rakes her leaves onto her garden beds, because the leaves are great mulch. “So they do double duty.”
When she started practicing organic gardening 40 years ago, the conventional wisdom was to remove all the old plant stems and debris at the end of the growing season, she recalls.
That practice is no longer recommended because it deprives insects of overwintering habitat.
“Now I purposely leave it there because I want to attract insects, and so I don’t even cut down the stems on my plants when I come back in the spring,” she says. “ I wait until it’s sort of more mid-season, because bees like to lay their eggs there, and then it takes a while for their babies to grow and emerge. So I make sure that I wait long enough so that can happen.”
Bee on tansy.
Photo Courtesy of Margie Patlak
Save the Snags
A snag is a standing dead or dying tree. As long as it remains standing, it can be life-giving for wildlife.
Margie wants to start a campaign called “Save The Snags.”
“These snags and deadwood that people find unsightly and try to get rid of are really important homes for insects and the birds that eat those insects,” she says.
She recalls letting a birch snag stand and going on to watch it host a chickadee nest. Later, it became a popular spot for woodpeckers to find food.
“It’s really important to realize that these are important homes for many different species,” she says.
Native Plant Restoration and Year-Round Blooms
Margie’s master’s degree thesis was about native plant restoration.
“ People were really gung-ho when they realized the importance of native plants in the garden and how they nurture insects, because there’s a lot of what I call picky-eater insects who will only eat certain kinds of plants because that’s what they evolved with,” she says.
It’s easy for insects to tap the resources of plants they have a co-evolutionary relationship with.
“ But I think we’ve gone a little bit overboard and maybe gotten a little too zealous about them,” Margie says. “And it is important to have native plants in your garden, but it’s also important to have something in bloom during the entire growing season because insects need to eat during the entire growing season.”
Margie’s garden has a combination of both native and non-native plants. She has pots of non-native exotics like petunias or calibrachoa because insects really appreciate them when other things aren’t in bloom, especially at the end of the growing season.
Gardens Should Garden for Something Beyond Themselves
“ There are several things that need to shift in gardeners’ heads when they want to garden for something beyond just themselves,” Margie says.
Adopting practices that improve the whole ecosystem benefits insects, birds and more.
“ One of the reasons I like to garden is I like to be out in nature, and I just love the winter wren that serenades me with its bubbling song while I’m gardening, and I love looking out at the beautiful colored warblers and vireos,” Margie says. “And if we don’t offer them insects because of the declining populations because of our practices, then these birds are not going to come up from these tropical areas anymore. Because the main reason they do right now is because we have an abundance of insects that they can feed to their nestlings. But there’s been a 30% decline in the number of songbirds that are being seen in temperate zones.”
She points out that while gardeners think they need to get rid of every weed, that’s really not necessary or advisable.
“I’ve discovered that a lot of these so-called weeds really feed the insects quite well,” she says. ”And they’re not any more invasive than any of the other flowers I grow. So consequently, I’ve invited into my garden wild daisies, goldenrod, daisy fleabane, because I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of different insects that come to them and they’re not really harming my other flowers in any way.”
She also keeps wild violets around because they are the sole host plant for fritillaries butterflies.
Bees That Count
Researchers have discovered that bees can count.
They put little “backpacks” on individual bees that transmit radio signals, so they can keep track of where the bees were going. Then they set up five regularly spaced yellow tents between the bee hive and the bees’ feeding station. After the bees got used to seeing the tents, the researchers took one tent away. The researchers noticed the bees were then overshooting their feeding station and had to circle back.
So bees rely on landmarks for navigation just like we do.
Farmer Ants
Believe it or not, ants herd aphids.
Aphids suck juices out of plant stems and excrete sweet honeydew. Ants like to eat that honeydew.
“ When they’re herding them, they’re not just nudging them along like a sheep dog,” Margie says. “They’re actually picking them up in their jaws and marching them over to a completely different host plant when one becomes dry. So I just found that amazing. And rather than being grossed out at looking at all these aphids and ants on my plants, I was like applauding them. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really cool, guys.’”
She adds that she never sees much damage on her plants from aphids, which she attributes to the number of flower flies that visit her garden. Flower fly larvae are voracious predators of aphids, so the aphids’ numbers stay in check.
There are a lot of systems out there that Mother Nature has provided that go after the aphids, and if you just are patient, if you can just sit back a little bit and let nature take its course, it really does tend to solve the problem.
Ants also recognize themselves in mirrors in mind-bending detail, according to Margie’s book. Researchers tested this by dabbing ants’ heads in paint. When the ants noticed the paint in their reflection. They tried to get the paint off.
“ It turns out that the insect brain is just so well designed and efficiently designed with all these intricate connections between the brain cells, that they can get a lot more done with fewer cells than we can,” Margie says.
Reconsider Wasps
Margie encourages gardeners to change their mindsets about wasps.
“Just realize that these are friends to the garden and not foes for the most part because wasps are incredible pollinators, and some studies show they’re just as good as bees in pollination,” she says.
Wasps are also predators of garden pests.
“I’m pretty sure that for every garden pest that’s out there, there’s a wasp that’s there just waiting to hunt them down and give to their young,” she says.
“They’re really important controllers of insect populations and just keeping everything in balance. And some people have estimated that one category of wasps called the parasitic wasps, that they gobble up half of all caterpillars. So imagine if we didn’t have them.”
She notes that it’s mainly the social insects that have these huge colonies that are aggressive, such as yellow jackets or paper wasps.
“But these species are way outnumbered by the solitary wasps … like the great black digger wasps. And they’re not likely to cause you harm. And even if you see yellow jackets or paper wasps in your garden, they’re usually there because they need to fuel themselves with nectar or they’re hunting down prey for their babies. And if you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you.”
Insect Safari at Night
”One night somebody accidentally left a porch light on that sort of spotlit my whole garden, and I looked out and I went, ‘Wow, what are all those things fluttering around my flowers?’” Margie recalls. “So I decided to join this garden party, and I discovered many different kinds of moths and other insects that I was able to take photos of and figure out what they were.”
Moth species outnumber butterfly species globally by a ratio of roughly 9 to 1, and 75 to 85 percent of moths are nocturnal.
“Most of us don’t know these moths because they mainly work the night shift, right? So if you want to see them, you have to go outside at night.”
A fritillary. It’s larvae feed on wild violets.
Photo Courtesy of Margie Patlak
If you haven’t listened to my conversation with Margie Patlak on “Insect Safari,” you can do so now by clicking the Play button on the green bar near the top of this post.
What have you spotted on insect safaris in your garden? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Episode 244: Wasps: Getting to Know These Underappreciated Insects, with Heather Holm
Episode 258: Averting the Insect Apocalypse, with Dave Goulson
Episode 261: All About Native Bees, with Heather Holm
Episode 316: Celebrate Pollinator Week with Pollinator Partnership
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“Insect Safari: Exploring the Wondrous World of Everyday Bugs” by Margie Patlak
“More Than Meets the Eye: Exploring Nature and Loss on the Coast of Maine” by Margie Patlak
“Wild and Wondrous: Nature’s Artistry on the Coast of Maine” by Margie Patlak
iNaturalist for Android devices
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