Most people wouldn’t be happy to find thousands of bugs in the basement.

But for Joe Sheldon, such a discovery was a blessing.

After Robert Pratt, the legendary Central Whidbey landowner, died in 1999, his giant insect collection was re-discovered in the basement of his Ebey’s Prairie residence. The collection had sat there since Pratt gathered the bugs from Whidbey Island and a few other places 70 to 80 years ago.

Rob Harbour, manager of Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve, said he knew the hoard of pinned-down bugs was valuable, but he didn’t know what to do with it.

“What an opportunity,” he said. “It’s like a snapshot of what was here back then.”

Harbour was very pleased when Au Sable Institute, a Christian environmental stewardship organization, agreed to accept and care for the bug collection. Au Sable has a campus on Smith Prairie and a part-time resident insect expert, Dr. Sheldon.

Sheldon properly curated the collection and is in the process of adding more bugs to it. He believes the 80-year-old insects will not only be a valuable teaching tool, but will reveal whether any major changes in the bug world have taken place on Whidbey Island in that time. And it will be a great reference collection for the future.

“It’s important to know what’s here today,” he said. “If you don’t know what’s here, you can’t take care of it. It’s the foundation of good stewardship.”

Sheldon is the kind of guy who clearly loves his work. His eyes light up and he gets excited when he talks about insects. He’s a professor of biology and environmental science at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, but also teaches at Au Sable’s Whidbey Island campus during the summers.

While Sheldon admits that insects aren’t as “cute and cuddly” as panda bears and other mammals, he said they are a vital part of the ecosystem. He described them as the rivets that keep an airplane together. Without insects, neither panda bears nor people could exist.

Sheldon said he was amazed to find Pratt’s collection of bugs in such good condition after sitting in a basement, without humidity control, since the Depression. He said only 1 or 2 percent had to be thrown out because of mold.

Just as important, Pratt was very professional in collecting. He correctly pinned the insects, labeled when and where he caught them, and identified them in many cases. The collection includes a wide range of insects, but is largely oriented toward beetles.

“The collection was extremely well done,” Sheldon said.

Pratt was very interested in the natural world. He went to the University of Washington during the 1930s and worked with a famous beetles expert. He wrote a paper on the black widow spiders living on a bluff he owned at Ebey’s Landing. He also collected invertebrates, rocks and minerals.

“He was very much a broad naturalist,” Sheldon said. “Insects occupied a very important part of his life.”

Pratt grew up on, and later inherited, 650 acres in the heart of the reserve. Throughout his life, he rejected offers to develop the land, including fields, forests, beaches, historic buildings and the scenic Bluff Trail. Today, the land is largely safe from development.

After getting Pratt’s collection about four years ago, Sheldon and a student carefully transfered them to a storage system. They are behind glass in Cornell trays, which go into a climate-controlled Cornell cabinet. They found that about 80 percent of the insects were from Whidbey Island. Pratt also caught bugs in Seattle and Eastern Washington.

Sheldon said he has also added to the collection, about an additional 20 percent, to “fill in the blanks.” He said he’s doing a “broad sweep of the insect community.” He’s found some beautiful butterflies and impressively large dragonflies.

There are thousands of types of insects living on Whidbey Island. But because of a lack of surface streams and fresh water bodies in general, the island isn’t home to large populations of mosquitos, biting flies, ticks and other bothersome bugs.

Sheldon said they certainly include undiscovered species — those that haven’t been described by science yet. In fact, he can’t identify most of the collected insects beyond noting the group or family they belong to. The individual insects would have to be sent to an expert studying a very specific group, or perhaps the Smithsonian, to be identified.

The world is full of millions and millions of kinds of insects. According to Sheldon, a typical square foot of healthy soil may contain ten thousands insects. “There are entire families of insects where there is nobody in the world capable of identifying them,” he said.

Sheldon said he is most interested in what lives in the remnant prairies. Au Sable has the largest relic, unplowed piece of prairie left on Whidbey Island. Like the insect collection, the four-acre prairie gives him a window back in time — before the prairies were plowed and the woods were logged.

Sheldon and his wife, Donna, recently drove back east after spending his sabbatical on Whidbey, but they’ll be back. The couple purchased a piece of property adjacent to Au Sable and plan to retire there.

That way, he will be able to continue to look after the Pratt collection, study the Island’s insect world and perhaps publish some academic papers.

“There are lifetimes of work to do here,” he said.