https://reasonstobecheerful.world/counting-bugs-to-save-birds/
"Wyoming’s professional pollinator whisperer didn’t always like bugs very much.
He’s a common sight these days among the scrubby plants retaking former oil and
gas well pads. But until he was about 20 years old, Michael Curran figured — as
most people did — that insects were pests. “You’d think of termites and bees,”
he says. “A bee was something that stung you.”
Then, when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Delaware,
Curran took a class taught by a now-famous entomologist that would change the
course of his life. He hadn’t intended to enroll. Everything else was full, and
Behavioral Ecology of Insects ended up being the only option left that would
fulfill a requirement for his biology degree.
“I wasn’t happy about being in an insect class,” he says. “And then it turned
out that it was one of the most interesting classes I ever took.” Thanks to
that class, and to the years he then spent working with that professor, Curran
came to see insects as the overlooked linchpin of the ecosystems he studied.
Even then, he didn’t plan on devoting much of his life to insects. His love of
native plants was what led him to enroll in an ecological restoration program
at the University of Wyoming in 2010. It was his knowledge of insects, however,
that helped keep him there for a decade as he worked toward his PhD.
Soon after he began his graduate program, Curran found himself in the middle of
an unfolding crisis. The sagebrush sea, a fragile ecosystem stretching from
Arizona to Montana and from California to Colorado, was disappearing. And the
greater sage grouse, a chicken-sized bird loosely resembling the turkey
collages that young children make around Thanksgiving, was on the brink of
being added to the endangered species list.
State officials and private energy companies were scrambling to find a way to
reverse the species’ decline without the federal government having to
intervene. Aided by researchers, they came up with a conservation strategy that
hinged on designating core sage grouse habitat and limiting human activity
there.
Curran was the one who realized how crucial insects would be in achieving it. A
decade later, he’s still adding new pieces to the puzzle."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
