FOLK/Kids Tony Sohns, Natural history educator

Saturday: 1 p.m. Children’s Area; Sunday: 4 p.m. Children’s Area

Go almost anywhere in the state of Maine, and you’ll find people who know about Tony the “Bug Man.” Maine Discovery Museum’s natural history educator, Tony Sohns has brought his science programs to audiences from Seattle to Searsport, along with his infectious enthusiasm for anything that creeps, crawls, slithers, hops or flies.

A native of Bucksport, Maine, Sohns co-founded Oregon State University’s Bug Zoo outreach program and served as assistant curator of the arthropod collection. Among his many credits, he has been a presenter, along with Bill Nye the Science Guy, at the Cavalcade of Science, and has presented a workshop, “Insects Spanning the Curriculum,” at the Sonoran Arthropod Studies Institute in Arizona.

As part of the education staff of Maine Discovery Museum in Bangor, Sohns was part of a team that developed the Museum’s new Turtle Alley exhibit, an exploration of Maine’s wetland ecosystems. Through a variety of Museum summer camps, home-school workshops and public programs, children are learning from “The Bug Man” that serious science can also be fun.