Albert Thurman's tidy home is full of bugs. More than 125,000, to be exact.
Through a hobby that has spanned three decades and nearly a dozen countries, Thurman, 58, has amassed a collection of butterflies and insects so vast, diverse and well-preserved that two prominent university museums have agreed to accept the collection into their permanent archives. With no formal training in entomology, Thurman has earned his wings - so to speak - through a passion for creatures that spend most of their brief life spans unnoticed by the average human eye.
"There's just some amazing, amazing stuff out there. You just don't realize it until you see it," the Ahwatukee Foothills man said.
The Florida native and retired Army master sergeant took up his interest in the mid-1970s while stationed in Panama at the former military training facility known as the School of the Americas.
Out of curiosity on one of his days off, he accompanied a group of researchers from the Smithsonian Institution on an insect-collecting mission. He was hooked. For the next 4 1/2 years, Thurman spent every free weekend and all of his vacation time scouring the forests and jungles of Central America in search of new species.
His collecting trips since have taken him to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, French Guayana, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Alaska. He returns frequently to Panama, and has preserved species of insects and butterflies native to forested regions that have since been logged or bulldozed to make room for development. He has gathered an extensive collection of bugs and butterflies from Arizona.
Inside the roughly 100 glass-topped wooden drawers in the home Thurman shares with his wife, Cheryl, is a cross-section of the winged and multi-legged. There are butterflies smaller than a thumbprint and others bigger than a fist; butterflies with wings of iridescent blue and others that look like two fragile leaves held together by a pin-thin body.
According to Thurman's trays, there are beetles walking the Arizona deserts in metallic rainbow hues, and others crawling through the jungles of South America with terrifying-looking horns.
"He has one of the finest sets of knowledge and collections from Panama that we've seen," said Thomas Emmel, director of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity at the University of Florida. (Lepidoptera is the study of butterflies and moths.)
Recently, Thurman agreed to will his collection of more than 50,000 butterflies and moths to the McGuire Center, and is in talks with the University of Nebraska to donate his set of more than 75,000 insects.
Thurman's collections are distinct from those of other amateur entomologists because he has maintained such meticulous records of where and when the specimens were gathered, said Brett Ratcliffe, professor and curator of the insect division at the University of Nebraska State Museum.
And unlike other collectors who diversify their insects by trading or buying new species, Thurman has obtained almost all of his bugs through his own fieldwork, Ratcliffe said. In Panama, Thurman was responsible for discovering a lush coffee farm in Chiriqui province that is now a haven for researchers, Ratcliffe said.
"He's an explorer as well, you might say," Ratcliffe said.
He has avoided malaria, dengue fever and serious injury, but has suffered through some nasty cases of food poisoning on his trips.
Thurman has no plans to hang up his butterfly net - he has a trip to Panama planned in this month, and another to Guayana in May.
"There's just so much variety," he said.