HINESBURG -- Don't go looking for ice cubes in Gordon Nielsen's freezer. For that matter, don't go looking for any food in there either. No room

Same goes for the freezer out in the shed. That's full, too. With moths. Frozen moths.

They all await the same fate.

One-by-one, Nielsen will put them in a glass jar the size of a bowling ball and filled with water to thaw them out -- "relax their wings," as he puts it. Then he'll put them under a magnifying glass to figure out exactly what kind of moths they are.

This is Gordon Nielsen's life's work: collecting and identifying bugs. For 27 years, until his retirement in 1992, he was doing it for the University of Vermont's Extension System. He's got a new gig now -- he does it for himself. Or for you. Send him a bug, $7.50 and a self-addressed, stamped envelope, and he'll identify it for you.

But Nielsen, 69, collects a lot more than just bugs. His 100-acre Hinesburg farm is populated by a dozen quarter horses. Out back by the weathered barn, a half dozen dead refrigerators line up like a crooked picket fence. Three junk cars keep them company.

"I hope you're not claustrophobic," he said recently as he welcomed a visitor to his home. It's easy to see the source of his concern: He is a man fascinated with imposing order on the world at large. And his file cabinet is his house. Bugs are everywhere.

Just inside the kitchen door is a beetle bootjack. Dozens of stained glass insects stick with suction cups to the picture window in the kitchen. In the kitchen, down the hallways, around the living room, makeshift bookshelves made of milk and apple crates crowd floor-to-ceiling. They hold reference books, mainly: An inch-thick volume, "Checklist of Beetles of Canada and Alaska," American Quarter Horse Magazine (all volumes to date); green, bound stud books for horses he, his wife and daughter raise; history books; the occasional novel -- John Fowles, "The Collector", -- bits, from simple snaffles to fancy Pelhams. There's just enough room for a couch, a small table and a chair.

There's an order here. Call it the Nielsen Decimal System: He knows where it is, but no one else does.

Stock cars and snakes

It doesn't seem to matter to Nielsen what he collects. He's willing to study about anything.

Consider this: 36 years ago, he went with his wife, Marge, and their young children to Thunder Road in Barre to watch stock car races. By the end of the race he knew the scorekeepers had made mistakes. "I knew the finishes weren't right, so I went up and told them they were wrong," Nielsen remembered. "So they said, 'Why don't you come back next week and keep score for us?'''

So he did. And he came back every weekend for the next 35 years. When he finally retired as official scorer last September, Thunder Road officials named a trophy after "Doc" Nielsen.

Then there were the rattlers.

"I grew up on Long Island and there were no poisonous snakes there," he said. "Poisonous snakes were interesting." So he caught a few. Twenty, actually. He kept them in a plexiglass case in the kitchen. The snakes are gone now, but the memory remains.

They were better than watchdogs: When someone would walk in from outside, they'd rattle like crazy; pad around the house, and the snakes would pay no mind.

"They were fascinating," he said.

At first, Marge was frightened. But after Nielsen built the case, "they got to be part of the family," she remembered. "At Thanksgiving dinner, their little faces were pressed against the window, watching us."

Nice entomologists

A child of the depression, Nielsen grew up on Long Island before it became a jumble of houses. He hunted and fished "and spent a lot of time in the woods ... and on the clam flats." As a teen, he'd wander down to the movie house and watch newsreels of paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews digging up dinosaur skeletons in China. For a while, that was what he wanted to do. Then the Communists closed mainland China to outsiders.

He settled on wildlife management. Getting a degree from Syracuse University, he took a job with the U.S. Forest Service in Idaho. It was there that Nielsen found his true calling. Most people wanted to work with deer. Or bear. But he found the forest entomologists particularly interesting. They "were nice -- and they made twice as much as the wildlife biologists," he said.

From Idaho, Nielsen went to Cornell, where he got his doctorate, studying the effects of insecticides on wood boring beetles. In 1962, he took a job with the state of Vermont. Three years later, he moved to UVM.

Filling the gaps

Retirement hasn't slowed Nielsen down.

Upstairs in the spare bedroom, he keeps several special cases of pinned bugs. They're mostly the glamorous ones; iridescent butterflies, beetles as big and bright as jellybeans, insects that look like sticks. He carries the cases to schools, to the Champlain Valley Fair or craft fairs anywhere he can find an audience.

Every Thursday morning, he does a spot on WDEV radio in Waterbury as the "Bug Doctor."

He laments so little is known about Vermont insects. Entomologists don't even know how many species inhabit the state, he says.

"Fifteen thousand? Twenty thousand? It could be higher or lower," he said recently, peering through his glasses with an intense gaze. Even moths and butterflies, the best known of the insect world, still are relatively unknown in Vermont. "There are maybe 1,800 species (of moths and butterflies)," he said. "And there are 96 that we can't even identify to species!" Three dozen of those unknowns were caught by Nielsen.

Nielsen is determined to do what he can to fill the gaps in that knowledge. He collects moths and other insects every warm night around his farmhouse. That's where the freezers come in: he collects more than he can keep up with. Last summer he got way behind -- diabetes temporarily robbed him of his vision. His eyes are better now.

And he figures some day, some day, he'll catch up.