by Jason Hernandez

Created on: March 09, 2009

Insect watching may not be as popular as birdwatching, but it has much more potential for variety. Insects are the largest class of living organisms, with more species even than plants. Insects can be found throughout the year - a few kinds even amid the snows of winter.

Some of the larger insects can be observed without any special equipment - butterflies, for example, and dragonflies and damselflies. These are among the most popular kinds of insects as many species are colorful and active. Look for butterflies wherever there are masses of flowers, mud puddles after rain, or the caterpillars' food plants. The monarch will be found wherever there is milkweed; painted lady, where there is thistle. Stands of fennel or dill will attract certain swallowtails, and any plants of the cabbage type will draw the cabbage white butterfly.

Dragonflies and damselflies will tend to be found near water - marshes, ponds, rivers. Many dragonflies are territorial, and will chase away others, both their own kind, and sometimes even larger species. A few kinds will even leave the vicinity of water and fly over open meadows. There are excellent guidebooks available both for butterflies and for dragonflies.

Other families of insects will be a bit trickier to identify. Most guidebooks to these will only identify families, or sometimes genera, as the different species can only be told apart by microscopy. Still, there is plenty to fascinate the observer. So long as we are at the water looking for dragonflies, we may as well take a closer look. In a swift stream, the quiet pools will often be home to water striders, with their wide-spreading legs for walking on water. Other water bodies will have various diving beetles, and the larval stages of the dragonflies and danselflies. Those bright red "worms" are actually the larvae of tiny flies called midges.

Summer nights are the time to listen for crickets and katydids. The easiest way to tell the difference is by location: crickets mostly call on the ground, katydids in shrubs and trees. Also, cricket calls repeat the same tone monotonously, whereas katydids have a multisyllable call. The sight of a bright green katydid is quite a treat. In much of the United States, there is also the snowy tree cricket, longer and more slender than the common field cricket, and a pale whitish-green in color. By day, beneath rocks, you may find the camel cricket, wingless, with a humped back.

Another typical nighttime insect is the firefly, easily identified

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