The Caterpillar Watcher

The story of how we grew wise to the wisdom of insect trails begins, oddly enough, with the lowly caterpillar. One spring day in 1738, a young Genevan philosophy student named Charles Bonnet, while walking through the countryside near his family’s home in Thônex, found a small, white, silken nest strung up in the branches of a hawthorn tree. Inside of the nest were squirms of newly hatched tent caterpillars, which bristled with fiery red hairs.

At just 18 years old, frail, asthmatic, myopic, and hard of hearing, Bonnet was a somewhat unlikely naturalist. But he was blessed with patience, attentiveness, and a relentless, burning curiosity. As he approached the cusp of adulthood, his father had begun pressuring him to become a lawyer, but he wanted to spend his life exploring the microcosmos of insects and other tiny creatures, a profession that had scarcely yet been invented.

Bonnet decided to cut down the hawthorn branch and carry it back, to better inspect their anatomy. But Bonnet wanted to observe the caterpillars’ natural behavior wholly unobstructed, , from the comfort of his home. He struck upon the idea of mounting the hawthorn branch outside the window-frame of his study. That window soon became a kind of antique television, a glass screen displaying a miniaturized world, before which he spent countless rapt hours.