Kristie Reddick stands in front of a semicircle of 4-year-olds, her long body contorted into the human version of a praying mantis.
"Crisscross applesauce, hands in your lap," her partner in bugs, Jessica Honaker, tells the kids, who quiet down, put their bottoms on the floor and get ready for their first look at a 3-week-old, almost transparent insect. As Honaker takes the small, plastic box around, she tells them to pay attention to the bent legs that give the insects their name.
"Say 'raptorial,'" Reddick directs the preschoolers -- a word they've likely never heard.
"You don't have to talk down to people," she says later, "not even to 4-year-olds. They can recite the names of dinosaurs, which are really hard. If you raise the bar, people will meet it."
As the kids repeat "raptorial," she explains, "I'm a praying mantis. I'm looking around and see something flying around. I reach out and grab it with my front legs."
"That's scary," squeaks one of the kids, who recovers quickly to ask, "What's next?"
In a 40-minute presentation at Learning Tree Preschool in Beaverton, 18 children learn from The Bug Chicks that insect poop is called frass, ladybugs don't taste very good, and spiders stick their fangs into crickets and turn their insides into a milkshake. Most of the kids reach out for Worf, a shiny, hard-shelled Madagascar hissing cockroach as big as their chubby hands. But it's the tarantulas that really get their attention, especially a little blue one named Cookie Monster, who sometimes sprays her pee onto the kids.
"They love that," says Honaker, 32, the brunette half of The Bug Chicks, two young entomologists who use humor to teach. Ever since they became partners in 2007, the duo have been on a mission.
"People don't know that much about bugs," says 34-year-old Reddick. "They think they know a lot about bugs, and what they think they know is scary. That's why we do what we do. You've got people out there fighting for the whales, people are out there fighting for the polar bears -- someone's got to be out there fighting for the bugs."
At the top of The Bug Chicks' website, it says, "Find your inner bugdork. It wants to come out and play." Reddick's and Honaker's dorkdom comes out in everything they do -- whether filming videos, teaching children, educators and park rangers or finishing each other's thoughts. They just can't help being funny.
Reddick grew up in Virginia dancing and performing, talents that are at the heart of The Bug Chicks' educational comedy. Everyone assumed -- including her -- that she'd continue to perform in some form or another. She earned a bachelor of fine arts at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and by 21 was cast in a bit part in a movie with Bruce Willis, with her own trailer and driver.
"I was living the dream, but I couldn't figure out why I wasn't happy," she says. "I felt like I was going to auditions to be someone else instead of to be me. It felt odd."
More and more, Reddick thought about Africa, the place she'd dreamed of since she was a child, when she hid under the covers with a flashlight studying the animal fact cards in a green National Geographic chest.
"I was an animal freak," she says. "My mind was utterly fixated on animals."
Her acting career came to an abrupt end when she fell off a horse and broke her arm, but instead of devastation, she felt like she'd been given a get-out-of-jail-free card. She lay in her childhood bed, her mother feeding her Percocet, watching a marathon of "The Crocodile Hunter." Once healed, Reddick took a $6-an-hour job at the Philadelphia Zoo, an experience that persuaded her to go back to school for a second degree. She enrolled late at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania. Two classes were still open: chemistry or entomology.
"I was like, 'What's entomology?'" she says. "Oh, insects. OK."
The course, by professor Tim Yoho, an old-school teacher who used an overhead projector, taught Reddick to love insects, but she couldn't stop thinking about Africa. So, she signed on for a program through Boston University to study large animals in Kenya in 2003. But "while everyone else was looking at elephants, I was looking at dung beetles."
Realization dawned; it was insects, not large animals, that she wanted to explore. Then, a yell in the dark crystallized her decision.
"I was in my little hut and heard a scream late at night," Reddick says. "It was a boy scream, which means it's something cool. I grab my net and run out, and it's my friend Harry (a fellow student). He's come out of the bathroom, and he's got a towel around his waist."
"'It's the biggest thing, you've got to see it.'
"'Don't worry, Harry. I've got my net.' I walked in and see this thing that looked like it had 10 legs. I thought, 'What arthropod has 10 legs? Oh, my God, I've discovered a new class.'
"It had big jaws and legs. I go to put my net over it, and it sees me and runs like lightning up the side of the bathroom and stops at eye level, rears back on its hind legs and opens its jaws and it makes this hissing sound at me.
"That was it. That is my moment of true love, love at first sight."
"It was like she'd found a unicorn," Honaker says.
Reddick's obsession with bugs intensified after that first meeting with a solifuge, or camel spider. She enrolled at Texas A&M University to work on her graduate degree, determined to return to Africa.
Honaker found her bug bliss at Marshall University in West Virginia, where she focused on physical therapy because she loved hockey. As a child, she preferred scary books to insects, but changed her mind after taking a course on invertebrates from professor Jim Joy. He inspired her to pursue a graduate degree at Texas A&M. When she got there in 2004, she met Marvin Harris, a professor who would become her mentor, and asked to work in his lab. He took her on to dissect mosquito larvae, which didn't thrill her. Eventually she moved on to aphids, specifically blackmargined aphids, one of her favorite insects.
"Be honest, you think they're adorable," Reddick says with a nudge.
"OK, they are cute," Honaker admits. "They're like little squishy bags of happiness. They're adorable and I love them."
The two bug freaks met in an insect photography course in 2005 at Texas A&M.
"We had the same camera, drove the same truck," Honaker says.
"It was fate," Reddick says, picking up the thought. "I believe in -- and this is going to sound so corny because we're scientists, but I don't care -- that when you throw it out there, things happen in your life that are meant to be. I met Jess and she was the person I needed to meet."
In 2006, Reddick combined a stipend, fellowship and student loan for a second trip to Africa, this time on her own to search for her beloved camel spiders. (She found 21.) But she was far from done with Africa. In less than six months, Honaker accompanied her on a six-month trip, once again to search out solifuge arachnids.
When they returned, their professional relationship began. But the name for the company didn't come to them until 2009, when Reddick was working for the Texas A&M education department as a teacher's assistant. A professor suggested the two make a training video and call themselves The Bug Ladies.
"Both Jess and I said 'eeew,' that sounds gross and old, like an octogenarian cruise," Reddick says. "We immediately both said, 'How about The Bug Chicks?'"
It was a match made in dorkdom.
"I won't lie," Reddick says. "We're dorks. But dorky is in."
In more than two dozen videos they've made for the entomology department at Texas A&M, the U.S. Forest Service and their website, the two definitely bring their bug dork out. They've dressed up as insects, buried themselves in sand up to their necks, made a yucca plant out of tulips and tried not to shiver while pretending the Oregon Dunes on a 30-degree day was a desert. In one of the most memorable videos, the pair renamed a barbershop quartet "The Fly Guys" and talked them into putting on sparkly glasses and crowns and singing a song Reddick and Honaker wrote called "Don't Be a Hater, I'm a Pollinator."
With all that to do, what about downtime? The Bug Chicks take a long pause. Well, Reddick says, we've gone kayaking a couple of times. And there was a whitewater rafting trip. Nothing else came to mind.
But now's not the time in their career to slow down, Reddick says, as Honaker nods. They've got workshops and classes to teach, a blog to write and website to keep current, money to raise for the Tanzania project and marketing to do. They've just started filming a self-produced Web series called "Spineless" that they hope will be picked up by National Geographic Channel.
Creativity and the passion to teach brought the two women together. But someone has to take care of paperwork and organization.
"I've never even had a lemonade stand," says Honaker, who nevertheless has become the company's business director.
The duo, who moved to Portland last year sight unseen because of the city's reputation for quirky creativity and sustainability, have settled into a pattern that works. Reddick is the idea person; Honaker is the one who takes the ideas and makes them happen.
"It's really become apparent that it's symbiosis and that we need each other," Reddick says.
"It's obvious we have great rapport on camera," Honaker continues.
"And you can tell we're having fun," Reddick finishes.
The result, the pair hope, is to be female role models for girls, to be the first women on TV to talk about bugs. The Bug Chicks are happy to take on the challenge.
"When you grow up, you don't have to choose between smart and pretty," Reddick says. "You don't have to choose between being a girl and being a scientist or mathematician. It's not exclusive."
But The Bug Chicks are certainly not a girl's club. Brendan Morris, 22, a former student of Reddick's now doing graduate work at the University of Illinois, could not get the smile out of his voice as he waxed on about them.
"The most important thing I learned," Morris says, "is when Kristie fell in love with spiders in Africa and her advisers kept telling her 'no.'"
She refused to listen to professors who considered her too young and inexperienced and didn't take her seriously. She later told Morris, "'When you're following a dream and someone tells you no, you're talking to the wrong person.' That defined my whole life. I give that advice to everyone. It's clich?, but you could put it on a poster with Mount Everest."
Maybe it will be one day. Portland businessman Stanley W. Fields predicts big things for the two entomologists.
"I can see them on National Geographic Channel or Animal Planet," says the guy who introduced the women to Jane Goodall, the world's foremost expert on chimps. "I just think they have unadulterated raw talent. The two of them together are very special; they're a team. They're destined for bigger things."
Maybe more so now that they've connected with Goodall, who has asked them to join her nonprofit Roots & Shoots program, which teaches children around the world about conservation. Honaker and Reddick are trying to raise $100,000 so they can build a library in Tanzania that will serve 60 Roots & Shoots schools and create a manual to instruct teachers and students about arthropod conservation. The hope is that their efforts will become a pilot project for other schools in the worldwide program.
Without Fields, who happened upon The Bug Chicks' r?sum? a year ago online, the introduction to Goodall wouldn't have happened. He calls himself "a connector," and in this case it was true. He contacted them and said he could arrange an hour with Jane Goodall at a friend's house before a talk in Salem.
"We've never met this guy," says Honaker, admitting they thought twice about responding. "But we could meet Jane Goodall."
"Or be brutally murdered," Reddick says. "I called my husband, told him where we were going, called Jessica and said, 'Get home. Get your stun gun.'"
The partners picked up Fields, one sitting in the front seat, one in the back, looking at each other in the mirror, telegraphing, "What are we doing?" The car pulled up, Goodall came out, and The Bug Chicks were floored.
"I wanted to be her when I was a little girl," Reddick says. "I still want to be her. She's lovely. It speaks volumes about her that she let us sit in the living room, eating cupcakes and drinking tea."
A year after they met their idol, an email from the director of a program they took part in hit The Bug Chicks' inbox. She wrote to say that a teenager who thrived in a workshop taught by the two hip entomologists in August seems to be developing a passion for insects.
Someday, like Reddick and Honaker, he may find his inner bug dork.
"He wants to do this for his life, for his career," Honaker marvels.
As usual, Reddick finishes her thought, "If we did that for one kid, that's what makes a difference."
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Kym Pokorny: 503-221-8205; kpokorny@oregonian.com; oregonlive.com/pokorny; twitter.com/diginwithkym; facebook.com/
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Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/hg/index.ssf/2012/10/the_bug_chicks_are_on_a_missio.html
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