A Naif in the Forest by Darrell Berger

Wing Tips to Hiking Boots: Musings of a New, Full-Time Poconos Resident

This photograph is blurry. He ran when an object several times his size, wielded by a being of unimaginable power and intent, hovered over him. He was the season’s last stinkbug.

More precisely, he was the season’s last Brown Marmorated Stinkbug. I think. There are a many varieties. This one came to American in 1998, first seen in Allentown, PA, and has since widely dispersed. Marmorated means “veined like marble.” His back looks like a shield from a warrior on “Game of Thrones.”

When threatened, rather than bite or sting, they secrete an odor often compared to coriander. Why this is considered malodorous, I don’t know. What enhances the taste of Blue Moon beer might be offensive when secreted by a bug.

Stinkbugs are also called Shield bugs. Stink or Shield ? If one is inundated with hundreds of them, as sometimes happens in the fall, then their secretions might seem noxious. When viewing the creatures one at a time, their beauty emerges: the complex symmetry of their intricate marbled shields.

Stinkbugs have no commercial value; nobody developed an advertising campaign for them, like when Chinese Gooseberries were rebranded to Kiwi fruit and the rest is marketing history. Stink/Shield bugs suffer the fate of anything found by humans in quantities large enough to inconvenience them. The smell begins not to entice like coriander, with lemon pungency, but to stink. Their beauty becomes invisible. They are perceived as invaders and the most important thing is simply to be rid of them.

How many stinkbugs make an invasion? When do they begin to stink? The one I tried to photograph seemed only to want to live and be left alone. Yet I know if confronted with hundreds in my basement I would think and act differently. The Brown Marmorated Stinkbug and the Human Being are both invaders of the forest. Both ought to tread through the forest softly, doing as little damage as possible. In this respect the bug exhibits what the human has yet to learn.