Cashing in on Bugs

Barney Tomberlin The Bug Man of the Chiricahuas

Text by Marcus Walton Photographs by Marty Cordano Not far from his home in Portal, Barney Tomberlin drives the road to Cave Creek Canyon. The moon hangs fat and rich above the San Bernardino Valley, and Cathedral Rock looms against the evening sky. Suddenly he stands on the brake. "Walking stick," he says to me, shifting into reverse. "A female with eggs." He backs up quickly, opens the door, and points his flashlight. In the darkness at the edge of the asphalt sits an insect no more than three inches long: a walking stick. Tomberlin plucks it from the roadside and gently turns it over in his hand. It is swollen with eggs. When it comes to bugs on the road, Tomberlin has the eye of a hunter. "You develop a knack for it," he says. He gets plenty of practice. His company, Hatari Invertebrates, which he started a few years ago, supplies live insects to filmmakers, universities, zoos, museums, high schools, and private collectors. Whatever the order trap-door spiders, honey pot ant queens, yellow spotted diving beetles Tomberlin finds the bugs and ships them off. A former fireman and emergency medical technician, Tomberlin moved to Portal from Southern California in 1984, after a heart attack forced his early retirement. Now his fax machine spews bug orders from across the United States and overscarab beetles; the Dallas Museum of Natural History needs velvet ants; the University of Trondheim in Norway wants vinegarroons. "I could sit here and take orders all day," Tomberlin says one morning, standing at the stove in his kitchen. But he hasn't got time for that now; he has packing to do. The air is heavy with a pungent blend of brewing coffee and melting plastic. With a heated awl, he punches breathing holes into the lid of a clear plastic container. He lines the container with a cotton pad and two slightly moist paper towels, then carefully places a live whip scorpion inside. He caps the container and adds it to others in a cardboard box lined with Styrofoam insulation. Inside the box, he places an ice pack and export documents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Then he seals the box and slaps on a label: KEEP FROM HEAT OR COLD. LIVE ANIMALS. Later he will take the box to the Portal post office and send it overseas by express mail. Before the week is out, it will arrive in Norway. Tomberlin's house is a clutter of vented containers, cardboard boxes, and a scrabbling inventory of centipedes, katydids, tarantulas, and praying mantises bugs on hold, waiting for the appropriate order. In a plastic jar on the kitchen counter, a Hercules beetle grinds away at an apple slice. Nearby, walking sticks nestle placidly in a cottage cheese carton. In the spare bedroom, safely packed away, scorpions wait with tails curled upward. When he needs to replenish his stock, Tomberlin may simply step out his front door at night and walk to the storage shed, where flying bugs gather on a bed sheet draped under a black light. A bulk supplier may drop in from the desert with a box of scorpions. At the post office, a neighbor may come up with a plastic bag in hand: "Hey Barney, need any vinegarroons?" On occasion, Tomberlin buys insects in quantity through the mail and sells them a few at a time to his retail customers. Sometimes he buys breeding pairs of insects and raises the offspring to sell. And he hunts. He prowls the fence lines and backyards of Portal. He rides the roads.

But the bounty of the road, like the catch in the yard, is never certain. It is subject to the vagaries of the season, the weather, and the hour of the day.

"It's not like a store, where you just reach up and pull it off the shelf," he says. "The conditions have to be right, and if they're not, it just won't happen."

Fortunately for his business, Tomberlin has another source he can turn to. He harvests insects from traps.

"The ants have raiding parties out this afternoon," he says, his truck barreling along. He spots a column of red ants stepping smartly across the sand at the side of the road. "They're going to steal the eggs of another colony," he explains. "They'll take the eggs home and hatch them into slaves."

The graded dirt road drops away from mesquite and yucca, snaking through sycamore shadows into a canyon. Before long Tomberlin stops the truck and walks into the brush to check his first set of traps: four pairs of five-gallon plastic buckets, buried to the lip, each pair connected by a "drift" fence of metal flashing, about eight inches of it sticking up out of the ground. The "pitfall array" is simple but effective: A Crawling insect hits the metal flashing, follows it left or right, and plops into a bucket.

Tomberlin reaches into one of the buckets with long-handled tongs and pokes through some leaves at the bottom. He comes up emptyhanded. He checks the other traps in the array, nothing there, either. He returns to the truck and drives deeper into the canyon.

At the next few traps, he finds mostly common crickets and beetles and scorpions of a kind he doesn't need. But as the afternoon fades into twilight, he and his sometime helper, 21-year-old Mitch Webster, begin to pull a respectable haul out of the pails: a wolf spider (a collector on Staten Island wants half a dozen), a giant Sonoran centipede and a death-feigning beetle, a wind scorpion (the University of Trondheim in Norway needs two), and

'I'm putting money in the bank,' he says,

The Bug Man

(CLOCKWISE FROM OPPOSITE PAGE, BOTTOM) When Tomberlin receives an order for a particular bug, the search is on and patience is the key. Some of the creatures he hunts include the always hungry praying mantis; hissing cockroaches; a leaf-footed bug; a brown recluse spider, whose bite can be fatal; the aptly named walking stick; and a horse lubber, whose coloration helps it evade predators.

'with insects that many people hate.'

Two bark scorpions (a collector in Sweden wants those). "It's neat to think these will be on display in Trondheim and Stockholm," Tomberlin says, dropping scorpions into plastic bags.

A trace of satisfaction creeps into his voice. "I'm putting money in the bank," he says, "with insects that many people hate." Tomberlin and Webster finish checking the traps and head out, running late and in a hurry. The truck leaves a roiling cloud of dust as it climbs out of the canyon.

"Tarantula hawk wasp," Tomberlin says, sliding to a stop. "It's got a tarantula." Sure enough, there's the wasp, dragging a paralyzed tarantula twice its size.

To nourish its young, the wasp intends to deposit its eggs in the living body of the spider. Tomberlin leaps from the truck, snatches the cap from his head, and tries to snare the wasp. At first he has it. But when he lifts his cap the wasp flutters away, leaving the stricken tarantula behind. Standing by the road with cap in hand, Tomberlin looks stricken as well.

He has been up since before dawn this day, answering the telephone, reading faxes, shipping orders, scanning the road, and emptying traps. Now, night is falling; he's bone-tired; his neck is stiff and sore. He shrugs, climbs back into the truck, and drives on.

The truck rushes through the darkness.

Nighthawks swoop and light on the road ahead. Three quail scurry into the grass. A great horned owl rises like a phantom, with a whisper of rustling wings. Tomberlin hits the brakes. "Millipede!" he cries. He backs up, opens the door, and reaches to the ground. He shines his flashlight at a squirming brown circle in the palm of his left hand. A millipede.

How does he do that?

"That's nothing," Webster says. "I've seen him spot a dark-colored vinegarroon at 60 miles an hour, on asphalt, at night."

Tomberlin speeds away again. The road straightens. He punches the accelerator, de-termined to make it to town before stores close. Something looms out of the night, a lumbering shadow in the low beams. Something big.

A cow! Tomberlin swerves to miss it, just in time. "Hit one of those," he mutters, "and we'll be wearing the engine around our necks. Those black cows are hard to see at night." Fifteen hundred pounds of beef on the hoof? Hard to see at night?

"I wasn't looking for cows," he says later.