A Bug and My Billion Dollar Art Heist

Some people have dogs follow them home; I have bugs. Tuesday I went for a walk at Sheep Pasture and came home with a bug that looked like the one below.

 It was perhaps a half inch long and looked similar to something lurking among the dozens of lures in my fly boxes. A quick check of the boxes lead me to the stonefly section, a little used part of my fly collection because I generally fish ponds, and stoneflies like streams. A little research led me to the family Leuctridae-the rolled winged stoneflies. For those of us that aren't going to rush to the nearest stream with a fishing pole, finding this little creature is still important.

North Easton has had septic system issues for years. One of the pluses of the upcoming Shovel Shop project is the building of a sewage treatment plant that should help clean up the Queset. As we start that clean up, it would be good to know just how polluted the Queset really is. This little bug helps us answer that question. Stoneflies in general and this family of stoneflies in particular are highly pollution sensitive. The bug in the picture is an adult who only lives for 1 to 4 weeks. They are poor fliers and only move a few hundred yards or less from their natal stream looking for mates. Stoneflies like to lay their eggs in streams that have stony bottoms. The larva burrow between the rocks and stay there from 1 to 3 years. At Sheep Pasture this means that they live between the Main Street dam and where the stream widens into a muddy bottomed pool near the Sheep Pasture bridge. The long life span in the water is one factor that makes it such a good pollution indicator. Now just as one swallow doesn't make a summer, one pollution sensitive stonefly doesn't make a perfectly clean river, yet one stonefly is reason to hope that as our stream gets cleaner there will be more and perhaps the fish that eat them.

Easton resident Pat Basler is the director of the Stoughton Public Library. She has been a strong proponent of the idea of selecting one book a year for a town reads together program. This year she has chosen Ulrich Boser's The Gardener Heist, the story of the incredible art theft at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. You can buy the book at the library for $10,  a five dollar savings off the list price. While you are there you can pick up a listing of the programs Pat has put together related to the book including art theft experts and a trip to the museum. Hurry, because the programs have already started.

The most valuable of the stolen paintings is Vermeer's "The Concert." Vermeer is the guy who did "The Girl with a Pearl Earring" and there are only 36 Vermeer's in the whole world. I have a half dozen tucked away in the back of the curiosity shop along with my Rembrandts and Botticellis. Well, not quite, but the Google Art Project lets me "steal" and from 17 museums around the world and create my own museum where I can get so close to the art that I can see the brushstrokes. Now there are some shortcomings-not enough modern art, not enough American, but about a 1000 paintings are available. If you like art, just Google "googleartproject." Along with creating your own art gallery, you can use a unique virtual reality system to actually walk the galleries of some of the most famous museums in the world.

Tomorrow a posting about Governor Oliver Ames' wife's beauty secrets and its connection to Abraham Lincoln's ears.