Word from the Smokies: Couple will focus on insect field guide during park residency
Fireflies are beetles, a group of insects that will be included in a new literary natural history field guide by author Jim Costa and artist Leslie Costa, who are serving as the park’s 2025 Steve Kemp writer and illustrator in residence.
Photo by Radim Schreiber, FireflyExperience.org.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the crown jewel of the Southern Appalachians, an ancient landscape teeming with life — including what naturalist and explorer William Bartram in 1791 called “insects of infinite variety,” many of them “admirably beautiful.” Some 200 years later, naturalist E. O. Wilson would describe them as the “little things that run the world.”
“Those six-legged ‘little things’ in the park form an essential part of the vast ecological web of interconnectedness that constitutes the pulse of the Smokies,” said Jim Costa, author of a forthcoming field guide from Smokies Life that will help park visitors better understand and appreciate these tiny lifeforms. It will be illustrated in part by Jim’s wife, Leslie Costa. The couple was chosen as this year’s Steve Kemp writer and illustrator in residence.
The Costas hail from Cullowhee and Highlands, North Carolina, where Jim is a professor and executive director of the Highlands Biological Station of Western Carolina University and Leslie is a freelance illustrator, editor, and transcriber for the London-based Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project. They met in graduate school at the University of Georgia in the fall of 1987.
“Jim was the teaching assistant for one of my required classes: Insect Behavior,” Leslie said. “He helped me with my project on doodlebugs. I wanted to see if lack of food would make them move their pits more frequently than if they had adequate supply.”
The doodlebugs, voracious ant predators, did move their collapsible pits in search of more food — and the rest is history. The Costas have lived and worked together pretty much ever since.
Jim has devoted his academic career to the study of insect social behavior as well as the history and development of scientific thinking, with a particular focus on Darwin and Wallace, a famed Victorian naturalist. Leslie’s professional interests have ranged from museum curation and exhibit and book design to scientific illustration. She has entomology and landscape architecture graduate degrees from the University of Georgia. While Jim conducted postdoctoral research on insect behavior and ecology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, she worked in the museum’s Entomology Department.
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When Jim became a biology professor at Western Carolina University, Leslie applied her museum curation skills at WCU’s Mountain Heritage Center. Combining her book design and scientific illustration talents with his many writing projects, the two ended up collaborating as author–illustrator on several books including Highlands Botanical Garden: A Naturalist's Guide (Highlands, 2012), and Darwin's Backyard (Norton, 2017).
“We're deeply honored to be awarded this year's Kemp Residency in support of our insect natural history field guide,” said Jim. “We see our project as a kind of celebration of the Smokies and its diversity as well as a means of educating and inspiring nature lovers about this often-neglected aspect of park biodiversity.”
Jim describes the book as a “natural history field guide" rather than solely an identification guide for good reason. When it comes to some groups, say birds or salamanders, it's possible to have a comprehensive field guide to all the species known to occur in the park. But that's impossible with insects. It's a huge and diverse group, with thousands recorded in the Smokies, and not all species are even known yet.
The book will feature a generous selection of the most commonly encountered insect species, groups, and “signs,” which are clues to their ecologies and lifestyle. Jim had long considered such a project, but it was the late author and naturalist George Ellison who spurred Smokies Life to undertake adding an insect natural history field guide to the park's popular “Of the Smokies” series.
“I had told George about the idea, and he was very keen on it—I believe that conversation arose after he read an essay I wrote as the coda for my first book The Other Insect Societies (Harvard, 2006), which Leslie illustrated,” Jim recalled. “I was deeply appreciative of George's interest and kind words for my work. Then, somewhere along the line George mentioned the insect guide idea to Smokies Life, sort of put the bug in your ear, you could say!”
Ellison, who served on the Smokies Life advisory council for book publications, envisioned a literary sort of insect field guide highlighting Jim’s natural history essay style. Discussions ensued, and it was soon decided that Leslie’s scientific illustrations of species would illuminate the insects’ behavior, structures, and tracings, aspects the casual observer is unlikely to notice. Larger scenes depicting the various park ecosystems where insects can be found would be provided by Smokies Life graphic designer–illustrator Emma Oxford.
The Costas started working on the book a few years ago but were obligated to complete several other book projects at the same time. Radical by Nature, Jim’s new biography of Wallace, for which Leslie was image curator and editor, was published by Princeton University Press in 2023. That same year, Darwin and the Art of Botany, co-authored by Jim with artist Bobbi Angell, was published by Timber Press. At the same time, Jim completed a long-standing project with historian Elizabeth Yale, an annotated edition of Darwin's The Descent of Man—with Leslie researching and curating the illustrations.
To focus on the insect book, the Costas will be splitting their residency into three two-week periods, spending time in the park for parts of May, August, and September.
“We felt this was the ideal way to experience the park through the ‘high season’ of insect activity, each period substantial enough to visit several areas of interest and devote time to the project,” said Leslie. “We have made far more visits to the park in the winter, oddly enough, to observe and photograph insect signs. Since the spring, summer, and early fall are the busiest times of year at Highlands Biological Station, we have not spent nearly as much time in the Smokies at those times of year. So, the residency will help remedy that!”
The residency also affords a wonderful opportunity to consult the park's extensive entomology collection at Twin Creeks Science and Education Center and to confer with park biologists and partners on species identification, distribution, and seasonality in the park, as well as abundance, population trends, and conservation concerns.
“There is no substitute for full immersion, spending time in particular habitats or community types in different areas of the park for observation, photography, and contemplation,” said Jim.
Besides having uninterrupted blocks of time for observing, writing, and drawing in different seasons, the couple is excited about exploring the park to a greater extent than has been possible before. They also look forward to talking to park scientists, educators, and other writers about their perspectives on the park's diversity and the best ways to connect visitors of many backgrounds with its natural history.
“Even kindred outdoorsy spirits keen on nature are unaware of the insect diversity around them, simply because they are far less likely to spot an insect itself than insect signs—telltale structures, tracings, holes, various clues to insect presence and activity,” Jim said. “Most folks who see these things don't realize they are insect signs.”
While a natural history guide should help park visitors learn about and better appreciate insect diversity in the Smokies, the book is still more than a year away from publication. Those anxious to learn from the Costas about this large and tremendously important part of our fauna can join them for “Bees, Bugs, Butterflies, and Birds: Connecting Insect Diversity and Native Plants,” an interactive Branch Out program offered by Smokies Life on both September 20 and 27.
“This will be fun,” said Leslie, “a way to encourage folks to look a bit more closely at the natural world around them and hopefully come to appreciate that there’s more there than seemingly meets the eye.”
The Steve Kemp Writers Residency is named for the long-time Smokies Life interpretive products and services director who wrote and edited many popular publications sold in park bookstores, including Who Pooped in the Park and Trees of the Smokies. The residency provides writers the opportunity to spend six weeks in the park working in any medium to produce some of their best work. Past residents include Latria Graham, who won the 2025 American Mosaic Journalism Prize recognizing in-depth reporting focused on underrepresented groups.
Frances Figart is the creative services director for the 29,000-member Smokies Life, a partner supporting Great Smoky Mountains National Park by providing educational products and services such as this column. For more information about the Steve Kemp Writers Residency, visit SmokiesLife.org or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
