Insects are Fairies!

A new summer writing series

What do you and I have in common with a dinosaur living 260 million years ago? Turns out, kind of a lot.

We breathe air, drink water, and have bodies made of the same periodic table of elements. We’re multicellular heterotrophs that rely on other species to survive. We are also currently surviving another mass extinction event alongside many of the same insects, some unchanged since the Jurassic era: wasps. Dragonflies. Ants. Beetles. Flies. Later, butterflies. A little later, ~100 mya (million years ago), lightening bugs.

Insects are here to remind us that we’re still new to the party of life on Earth, and if we pay attention, we may learn something about how to stop trashing the place.

Welcome to Insects are Fairies, a new summer series. Together, we’ll study the mysteries of the wild world through the lens of our co-evolutionary history with insects.

Even if you’ve never had an inkling of interest in entomology, stay with me - I did not get into farming for a pre-existing preoccupation with bugs. In fact, for a long time, it created an adversarial relationship between me and the broadest class of species in the Animal Kingdom: Insecta. While I’ve always been adamantly opposed to the reliance on pesticides in food production, I’m also not naive to the power of insects to destroy thousands of dollars of food on a single farm, let alone across entire regions.

However, when you spend this much time outside, crouched low, or briskly walking back and forth across a farm like ours - this sacred, protected leased land cradled within 400 acres of the Riveredge nature preserve, you see some things. It’s a key habitat destination for migratory birds, a riparian buffer zone along the Milwaukee river where the sturgeon fish are making a comeback after near-extinction. There are two ponds full of frogs, toads, and turtles, colonies of endangered and at-risk plants, active populations of morels and other mycorrhizal fungi, and basically a whole lot of ecological diversity.

Crecopia moth, photo by Farmer Caleb

Wildlife encounters are part of the job here. But far and away the majority of wildlife interactions we have are of the miniature variety: the bugs, followed by spiders. Followed by toads and frogs. Followed by snakes and birds. Plenty of rabbits and rodents. Raccoons and Opossums. Turkeys and cranes. Groundhogs. Three times, mink. Once, a fox. Each of these are enough to inspire poems, but insects deserve their due.

For years, I was in the deep end of the pool, trying to stay afloat of all the things you have to learn to keep going as a farmer. I’d see the insects, some I knew the common names of and most I didn’t, and kept going. There was always a fire to put out that called my attention more loudly than insects, unless it was time to, say, eliminate a paper wasp nest on the inside of my chicken coop, with a gloved fist in the middle of the night. In 2021, I enjoyed learning about insects as part of an arborist certification program, only to realize that my fear of heights would not be conducive to swinging 40 ft up a tree with a chainsaw. And that was that.

That ambivalence changed when my current group of farmmates formed in 2024. Shout out to farmers Anneke, Sovereign and Amirah for their curiosity, photo documentation, and infectious enthusiasm. After months of a growing fascination in us all, we were sitting around a fire on the Fall Equinox. Sovereign said “Insects are Fairies.” And I couldn’t unsee it after that.

The next winter, I made my first zine since before the pandemic by the same name. It was perfect winter work, digging through the archives of the shared farm photo folder identify and research each insect. I wanted to know, beyond other basics like the name and what it eats, how long ago it first appeared in the fossil record. I was floored by the results. Putting insects into the context of evolutionary history illuminated the fact that the insects we see today are basically living fossils. They have endured multiple mass extinction events. They have seen Earth through some of the most toxic states imaginable, like a thousand-year darkness that followed the meteor strike that killed the dinosaurs. And here they are, eating garden plants, making honey, building nests in the eaves of roofs and in the garlic beds, extracting our blood, and stinging us in such a quick and efficient way as if they were made for it. Because they were. They practiced on even our pre-primate ancestors.

So, where’s the zine?

Well, I got carried away. It ended up being 14 pages long, front and back, and it HAD to be in color to do the photos of the insects any justice. Many of them are even higher quality than those found in field guides. I ran the master copies through a few trial runs of printing, and the cost just to print each one was $14. Not what people want to pay for a little folded 8.5”x11” zine, and definitely more than I can pay to print a bunch up front. You can get actual, published books for less.

I also struggled with a lot of logistics. I don’t understand the right process for selling a zine containing photos taken by people other than me. In discussion with my farmmates about it, it seemed like they were supportive, but what if it blew up? How would I even put it up for sale, and how would I cover taxes, shipping envelopes, and costs? Where in my small house would this shipping process live?

Instead of all that, for now, I want to revisit the zine and the insect encounters since as a substack series. That way, it’s out in the world, in full color, in your inbox, for free.

If you want to support my work, you can become a paid subscriber on substack. My novel-in-progress, Ascendancy, as well as smaller projects like this require a lot of time and care, which is often hard to justify as a working class farmer and parent. It’s also hard to justify against the horrors of injustice that we are living through every day. I will put what I have, including farming and writing, to best use in service of what’s to come. I will remind myself, and you, and anyone who will listen that a better world is still possible. That food is the love language of the Earth to our bodies, and to one another. That insects are fairies, and maybe we have a little magic dust left in us, too.