Beetle Gardens for Tough Times is a community arts project and planting workshop that created emergency ration gardens for Chimney Swifts (a local endangered bird) and other insectivores during these tough times of rapidly declining insect populations. Though small, these container gardens of beetle friendly plants were intended as small gestures of support towards vulnerable populations of insect eating animals, a gesture of hope that the few insects supported by the garden may get these creatures through to a better time. The project was at once a practical ecological gesture and a shared fable about vulnerable populations and the unintended consequences of western progress.