It’s a Small World : ‘People . . . approach insects as things to be stepped on. Most people like things that are soft and furry.’

When a rainstorm drenched the area one evening recently, most folks were content to stay inside their houses and watch TV or cozy up to a fire.

Not Elois Hawks. She drove to Ramona with a friend, rigged up a battery to an ultraviolet light by the side of a road near Dos Picos County Park, and collected rain beetles.

“We got completely soaked,” Hawks said with a smile. “But rain beetles emerge and fly only when it rains, and we got 60 of them--a pretty good haul for one night.”

The inch-long black beetles, one of the largest varieties in the county, are attracted to ultraviolet light, and Hawks and her friend simply nabbed the bugs as they flew in.

Hawks is an amateur insect collector, one of a handful of people around the county who spend much of their spare time observing, collecting and sometimes even raising insects. It’s a relatively unusual hobby, Hawks conceded. But it no longer bothers her that some of her friends think anyone who likes insects is, uh, a little different.

“I finally decided that they have their hobbies and I have mine,” said Hawks, a retired elementary school teacher and a volunteer docent at the San Diego Natural History Museum. “If they want to watch soaps all day, that’s fine. I hate to do that.

“People generally approach insects as things to be stepped on. Most people like things that are soft and furry, like mammals or birds. I’m interested in mammals and birds, too, but there’s an additional fascination with insects--the fascination of the unknown.

“People have studied every mammal there is but there are thousands of insects out there that haven’t even been named. No one knows what they do or how they live.”

Another dedicated local collector, Robert Parks, said: “It makes me feel sad that people can’t appreciate insects. It’s like they’re missing part of life. Studying insects is one way of understanding the world we live in, and to me, that’s important.”

Hawks pointed out that, by actively studying and collecting insects, amateurs add to the scientific knowledge of many species. And numerous amateurs here have donated their collections to the Natural History Museum, supplementing the museum’s research collection in a field where funds for acquiring new specimens are scarce.

In 1983, for example, Richard Breedlove donated 15,000 well-preserved butterflies, most of them collected in San Diego County over the last 55 years.

“All of our major collections began as donations from private collectors,” said David Faulkner, chairman of the entomology department at the museum. “But the great thing about a guy like Breedlove is that he went to the same places year after year, so that his collection reflects the abundance and relative diversity of many species over time.”

To Breedlove and some other collectors here, collecting insects is an end in itself. “I’m not much interested in their life histories. I just like to collect all the different types,” said Breedlove, 66.

In contrast, Hawks is more intrigued by insect behavior. Like most collectors, she specializes in certain varieties--in her case, moths--and has wooden boxes full of her most prized specimens mounted on pins.

But Hawks also raises moths from caterpillars to adults, keeping track of such details as what they eat and how long it takes them to pupate. “What fascinates me the most about insects is their behavior. It’s interesting to watch live insects and see what they do,” she explained.

“I’m interested in the living, moving animals,” agreed Parks, “not what they look like in a box. A photograph or notes on some activity that has never been observed before is many, many times better than a dead insect.”

Parks, 43, is a native San Diegan who attended Crawford High School and now lives in Santee. He has been interested in insects ever since, as a 12-year-old, he saw a wasp drag a small caterpillar down into a hole in the ground. “I waited awhile, dug up the nest, and found an egg on the caterpillar,” Parks said. “I remember that vividly.”

Parks’ specialty is wasps and bees. “There’s too much to learn if you study all insects, and to me, bees and wasps are the finest things in the world. They’re more beautiful than butterflies,” he said.

“Besides, a lot of people collect butterflies, and not that many study bees and wasps. I suppose a lot of people are turned off by them--they don’t have big flat wings, and they might actually attack you--but I get a lot of pleasure from them. They’re very interesting animals.”

Some of the wasps that prey on large spiders “are like the Darth Vaders of the insect world,” Parks declared. And metallic-green orchid bees, a jungle species, rub their legs on the aromatic leaves of orchids, then gather in groups so that their collective scent will attract females.

Parks admitted that he has been stung repeatedly while pursuing his hobby. Once, he inadvertently walked over the entrance to a hornets’ nest in the ground, and had to dive into a nearby pond to escape the angry swarm of hornets that came after him.

“There were several still in my hair when I resurfaced,” he recalled. “I got stung many, many times. But with a lot of wasps, the sting is like a hot needle being inserted into you, and within half an hour or an hour it’s like it never happened.”

Parks said he has about 10,000 specimens stored in cabinets in his Santee town house, but added: “I don’t make the best collector. I don’t like to kill things, even insects.

“Does an insect feel pain? Of course it does. Every living thing feels pain. So I try to do more observing, and limit my collecting to just what I need to be able to identify what I see.”

Often, the only way to identify a particular insect is to examine its microscopic genitalia and compare it to that of similar insects. That’s no obstacle to Parks, who has a 70-power microscope for just such purposes.

“Identifying insects can take a long time--a great deal of them look (virtually) identical, even under the microscope--but it’s something I enjoy doing,” he said. He also has camera equipment that enables him to take pictures of, say, paper wasps, at three to four times life size.

“I suppose it sounds strange, but almost everything I do is directed toward allowing me to study insects,” said Parks, who has worked as a custodian and at a variety of other manual labor jobs “to support my interest in insects. I’ve got a four-wheel-drive truck that gives me access to remote places, and most of the trips I take are planned around insect collecting.”

Parks’ wife, Megan, often accompanies him, and while she occasionally collects insects for her husband, she does not have the consuming passion for the tiny creatures that he does. “I have learned some of the proper (Latin) names,” she said with a laugh. “For instance, I used to call the ammophilid wasps ‘the long skinny ones,’ but I’ve been corrected so many times . . . “

When it comes to observing and identifying stinging insects, Parks has few peers. As a teen-ager, he once lay motionless in a field for so long observing bees that a nearby resident mistook him for a corpse and called police. And he has spent countless hours perusing books such as “Solitary Wasps” and “Bees of the Eastern United States,” learning the Latin names of various species and how to identify them.

Although he is entirely self-educated as an entomologist, Parks has become so expert in his field that Faulkner recently hired him to identify and classify 6,000 unsorted bees, wasps and ants in the Natural History Museum’s collection. “He’s the best person down here to do it. He knows the bees and wasps far better than I do,” Faulkner said.

Amateur collectors who raise insects sometimes become experts of a different kind, Faulkner added. In some cases they have increased the knowledge of insects’ feeding and concealment habits, and have documented relationships between the larval and adult stages of various species.

Hawks, whose interest in insects began when her son had to collect a few bugs for a junior high school science project, has reared moths for years at her home in San Carlos. She is raising the caterpillar larvae of a silk moth from Mexico, using the kind of plastic containers that most people use to store food in their refrigerators.

The caterpillars hatched from eggs that were given to her by another local insect collector. “When they first hatched, they were black and only a quarter-inch long,” said Hawks. “They lined up behind each other and marched around the container in a train.”

Now, after shedding their old skins several times, the caterpillars have grown into striped creatures more than an inch long.

“They still like to snuggle up together a lot. Other moth larvae are very solitary,” Hawks pointed out.

She feeds them avocado leaves. Soon the caterpillars will attach themselves to a twig or a leaf and pupate, and months later the adult moths will emerge. Hawks plans to keep a few of the moths and give the rest to her collector friends, “because this is the first time this particular moth has been raised in captivity, and no one has it. It will be very desirable for collectors,” she said.

On the other hand, the rain beetles she collected near Ramona will go into collections of local insects that Hawks puts together for the museum’s docent program. She and the other docents will take them to schools, and will try to explain to students that the beetles and other insects are a part of the local wildlife that is often overlooked.

“I’ll try to explain a little about their life cycles, their behavior and their beauty,” she said. ‘You can’t make believers out of people who have been terrified of insects all their lives, but out in the schools, I think, we’re impressing on kids that (insects) are beneficial.”