Above, this lighted sheet dupped insects so that participants could catch them and get a closer look. Below, Entomologist Michael Klein helps identify some of the insects captured during Bug Nite.

     ALPINE — It’s true — the critters come alive in the nighttime. Michael Klein, the entomologist and leader of Alpine’s first Bug Nite at Wright’s Field, estimates participants captured and released 35 to 40 different insects during the Saturday, June 23 evening event. An added plus was a group of participants were surprised by a rare and secretive snake.
     A popular event at other nature preserves, more than 35 adults and children attended the event sponsored by the Back Country Land Trust (BCLT). Klein started the event with some bug facts, including that about 80 percent of the food we eat is due to direct or indirect pollination from an insect.
     “The next time you go to the salad bar, thank an insect,” Klein said.
     For the event, white sheets set up next to ultraviolet lights duped insects into thinking the bright sheet was a huge flower. Insects land on the sheets searching for nectar, allowing children, with the help of adults, to collect them into small cubes with a magnifying lens on the top.
     As Klein identified each insect brought to him, both adults and children huddled around his table. After excitement about a scorpion sighting under the sheet, which was never found, a western corsair assassin bug was one of the first lucky finds.
     Klein explained that the assassin bug is more active at night and has a very painful bite, “considered more painful than a bee sting,” says Klein, who made sure the bug’s release occurred away from the group.
     Children trooped in with a variety of moths, wasps, beetles, including the larger Junebeetles, and even robber flies, a bumblebee-looking fly that feeds off the blood of other insects.
     One boy abandoned the sheet method and turned over rocks to see what he could find. Moments later he presented his cube containing a harvester ant, with an egg in its mandible.
     “Since the nest was disturbed, the ant was in the process of moving its nest that night and that is why we saw the egg in its mandibles,” said Klein, who explained the importance of harvester ants since they make are the primary diet for horned toad’s diet.
     A group of seven adults and children who arrived late to the event encountered their own surprise on the trail, a skinny, foot-long, tan snake with a black head. Later identified as a Western Black-headed snake, Dr. Brad Hollingsworth, curator at the San Diego Museum of Natural History, says the snake is rare because it’s so secretive.
     They’re more common in Texas and on the East Coast but “down here not much has been turned up about what they’re like. Usually you find them six to eight inches long, so your find was a mature one. It’s usually found under loose soil or a rock so the group’s sighting of it crossing the trail was a good find,” he said.
     Participants leaving the event asked if there would be another one next year. Due to the positive response, BCLT plans include another Bug Nite event next summer.