BUGS SET BAR ABUZZ.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

They were bug-eyed.

"I'm totally blown away," Emilie Goosh said. "Lookin' for beer and you find butterflies."

That's not all Goosh, 22, of Garberville, Calif., found Wednesday at Sam Bond's Garage. She and friend Reid Benson of Eugene, also 22, found big, hairy spiders, scorpions, waterbugs, stick bugs, stink bugs, bedbugs, junebugs, ladybugs, bees, beetles, ants, flies, fleas, cockroaches, crickets, moths and, yes, butterflies. Lots of them. In colors you never imagined.

Anything that creeps or crawls or flies. Anything larval. Anything with a head, a thorax, an abdomen and compound eyes. Anything that reproduces in mass quantity - it was here.

With beer.

Thanks to Don Ehlen.

The Seattle entomologist and his traveling "Insect Safari" have been visiting area schools this week, but one of his favorite things to do is "Bugs and Brew." He's been doing it at Seattle-area bars for 15 years and thought he'd try it on this trip to Eugene. And the earthy, Blair Boulevard-area Sam Bond's was more than happy to oblige.

"This one here? This is like a rare mutation, and it's hatched out of my apartment," Ehlen, 46, explained to the crowd that was gathering around his display, which he packs in 60 boxes and carts up and down the West Coast in a 1967 Volkswagen bus.

He was talking about an Australian stick bug, about 10 inches long with a body that resembles a thin piece of bamboo and has eyes seemingly from another planet. A bug that would most likely be a serious bugaboo for the manliest man, say, John Wayne in his heyday, and send him running, screaming.

Do you like bugs, Bethany Thorsen?

"No!" said the 26-year-old Eugene woman, who was clutching a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Yet she couldn't take her eyes off any of them. "Well, they're safe behind here," she said of the glass cases set up in the bar on a table, along with a small box that read "Tips 4 Gas."

Ehlen has been studying insects since he was a 6-year-old boy growing up in Onoka, Minn. He would ride his bicycle to the library and spend hours reading about them, looking at them. In school, while the other children went out to play at recess, he was looking at bugs in the encyclopedia until his teacher would holler, "You get out there and play!" While other kids played baseball or marbles, "I would just collect bugs," Ehlen said.

After years of working in the aquarium business in Albuquerque, N.M., and Seattle, Ehlen said his lifelong obsession was starting to, uh, bug him. So in 1981, he took to collecting full time and now has about 6,000 specimens.

"I catch them, I buy them and people give them to me as gifts," Ehlen said.

Gross.

An admitted arachnophobe for much of his life, Ehlen has nonetheless conquered his fear and collected lots of spiders, including a sample of the world's largest - a big, brown Goliath tarantula that's about the size of an outstretched human hand. He got it seven or eight years ago, Ehlen said, from a friend in Port Townsend, Wash., David Gordon, who was working on a book called "The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook." Gordon had ordered the dead arachnid from New York City, and he wanted to cook it and eat it to see what it tasted like, Ehlen said. But the tarantula had been frozen and Gordon didn't think it would be too appetizing.

"This spider's ruined, do you want it?" Gordon asked his friend.

What do you think?

CAPTION(S):

Don Ehlen calls his program "Bugs and Brew." A Goliath beetle was one of the specimens greeting patrons Wednesday at Sam Bond's. Traveling tarantulas weave webs of intrigue. Paul Carter / The Register-Guard Bethany Thorsen (right) and Dan Hutchinson view some of the 6,000 exotic insects in Don Ehlen's collection during Ehlen's "Bugs and Brew" event Wednesday at Sam Bond's Garage.