Buggin’ Out
Take a large plastic bucket. Stack inside of it a selection of egg boxes and crumpled paper, the more nooks and crannies the better. Cut a circle out from the middle of its lid and place a funnel in it, narrow end pointed down into the bucket. In the centre of the funnel, place a bright or ultraviolet strip light. Surround it with three or four plastic vanes. Place it somewhere high up if you can, on a garden table or flat roof.
You’ve just made a moth trap.
Light it at dusk and go to bed, and try not to be distracted by the eerie blue glow creeping through the cracks in your curtains. Were you inclined to stay and watch, you would see a blur of wings, hear dull plastic thumps, flashes of colour, and silhouettes against the plastic bucket. Moths are attracted to the light, crash into one of the vanes, and fall stunned down the funnel and into the cache of hiding places below. Confounded by the narrow aperture of the funnel and the light now blocked by cardboard, they give up their attempts to escape and go back to sleep.
There are many worthy, ecological reasons to trap moths. To map changing populations, the impact of climate change and habitat destruction, migration patterns and genealogical divergence. But the most fundamental one is just to look at them. Most experiences with moths involve frantic motion — thundering against light fittings, windows, faces. Wings ablur and powdery dashes of wing scales left behind. These kinds of chance meetings are the reason they are a largely unloved insect. They appear abrasive and antisocial, the equivalent of a drunk crashing across your table at 1am. In repose, however, they are another story.
Moths are beautiful. Some of the most beautiful look like they should have come from a tropical forest somewhere, with alien flashes of livid pink or mottled zebra stripes. There is almost a perversity to it — why paint themselves in such glorious patterns only to conceal it under darkness and frenetic action? Sometimes the best way to appreciate them is to catch them unprepared.
Even disturbed, it takes most moths a little while to take to the wing. Once awakened they’ll stand in place for a while, vibrating, warming up their wings for flight. This is your thirty second warning to put them back or otherwise prepare for them to disappear through an open door. It’s usually best not to try and capture a moth on the wing — their wings are fragile, their delicate coatings of scales easily shaken off — so if you don’t want to hurt them, you should be prepared for them to leave. There are some exceptions to this, not least the Yellow Underwing, one of the main perpetrators of bashing into your light fittings. They are both extremely common and extremely skittish, and require no warming up time at all. They go from standing to ballistic in a millisecond.
So: you trap them. And then, in the morning, over coffee and toast, you very carefully remove the egg boxes to see what you’ve found. Where possible you make a list, to send to your county record keeper. And then you equally carefully return them to the bin, ready for release at night.
There’s another step here, and it isn’t an official one, but I’m certain it’s one that almost every moth trapper participates in. You find your favourite one, and you pick it up. Most moths will tiptoe forwards onto a finger presented just under its face, and then perch there happily for a while as it decides whether to make a break for it. If you wanted to eat it, this would be the moment, but you shouldn’t. Holding moths is another privilege unavailable to purely nighttime encounters, where they’re fully warmed up, ready to rumble, and have a busy itinerary ahead of them. In the morning, while they sit bleary and baffled, they will sit as compliant as a trained pet.
A similar urge applies to caterpillars, which are substantially less delicate. The majority are smooth, chubby and slow moving. When they do get going, they move with a pleasing rippling gait, storming up and down your arm in a fruitless search for food. If I see a caterpillar, you had better believe I’m going to attempt to pick it up.
A small number of caterpillars are hostile to being picked up, though in the UK their threat is overstated. Usually they are thickly haired, and these fine hairs can cause irritation to eyes or sensitive skin. I’ve been picking up “woolly bears” for years however, and I’ve never had any ill effects. I also fell into a nettle patch once as I swerved to avoid running one over with my bicycle, so I feel that I am owed a certain karmic tolerance from them.
Woolly bears (this encompasses a great many varieties — once it would likely be a Garden Tiger, though they are in decline, most recently I have come across Fox Moths on moorland) are peculiar in their tendency to cross roads. My theory is that they are sufficiently offputting to birds and predators that they don’t have the same need as others to conceal themselves — instead they are happy to march across the road, bold as brass, tiny little loping lengths of fur, safe in the knowledge that a passing blackbird would choke on them. Much like many of the adult moths with their furred forelegs, there is a certain mammalian quality which endears them to me. They aren’t chitinous or slimy. They look like they’re constructed of the same matter as kittens.
Outside of the UK is another matter. The caterpillar of the flannel moth has a sting so painful that it has been described as like breaking a bone — a white hot, urgent pain — and can become chronic. This is especially unfortunate as they are the platonic form of the Caterpillar You Wish To Touch, resembling ludicrous hairpieces. This particular caterpillar is something of a celebrity on the WhatsThisBug subreddit. There are several similar subreddits which exist to identify things — the generic WhatIsThisThing one is notorious for the frequency with which people dig up unexploded ordnance and post a harmless question about it before indicating they’re going to try and get into into with a chisel. On WhatsThisBug, the flannel moth caterpillar is the equivalent of a landmine. The chisel is — as above — the overwhelming urge to pick them up, and they are frequently photographed on the palm of some unwitting victim’s hand. So too the “Toe Biter” or Giant Water Bug, whose appearance in the proximity of uncovered flesh is treated by commenters as something like a live grenade.
This desire to pick things up isn’t limited to insects, although your chances of picking up any other sort of wildlife in this country are significantly reduced. An Instagram user called Garrett Galvin (an extremely Stan Lee name) is more commonly known as the Yoink Guy for his tendency to find a dangerous creature and immediately pick it up and say “yoink”, an indignity which the snake/cayman/spider/lizard endures with sullen hostility. In this respect he continues a fine tradition of TV naturalists whose main selling point is their total fearlessness. One can only hope he doesn’t end up Irwin’d.
The other things I like about moths are their names. Some are bluntly literal — the Brown Line Bright Eye does indeed have a brown line and an eye-shaped marking on it. The caterpillar of the Elephant Hawk Moth does look like an elephant’s trunk. Others have a little more whimsy. There are four paradoxical moths named Stranger, Uncertain, Confused and Suspected, presumably after lingering for so long in the ??? column that they became known for their unknowability.* Several could have come from the pages of a fantasy book — there is an Alchymist, a Sorcerer and a Druid, as well as the more prosaic Passenger and Geometrician. More cruel are Conformist and Lackey.
There are also several whose names reflect oddly specific markings. The Silver Y, the Figure of Eighty, the Chinese Character and the Hebrew Character all look to have been stamped by a typewriter. Their latin names can offer a pleasing window into naming conventions as well, which are also more literal than you might think — what else would the Silver Y be named except Autographa gamma?
The best moth I’ve ever seen in the flesh is the Privet Hawk Moth (Sphinx ligustri). Hawk moths are already among the most impressive, and certainly the largest. The Death’s Head Hawk Moth is the centrepiece of the iconic Silence of the Lambs poster. Several are very common — Elephant, Poplar and Lime Hawk moths are endemic to the UK. Privet Hawk Moths are a little more special though, and I found mine on a childhood holiday in France (though ‘mine’ implies ownership: this moth didn’t belong to anyone but itself). Two friends of my parents lived in a rickety farmhouse in Normandy, and we camped in their yard. Somewhere in the back of a Volvo estate piled high with tents, sleeping bags, clothes, dogs and children, nestled the moth trap.
Moth traps in rural places can almost be too successful. On a still, warm summer evening, the air must have been thick with them. We did our best to log all of the varieties, but some came in the hundreds. There is a phrase which migrated from birdwatching to moth collection, or possibly vice versa — Little Brown Jobs, or LBJs, the name for the thousands of mostly uninteresting and uniformly brown varieties which get in the way of the shiny ones.* Beneath these shuffling piles of LBJs, however, something special.
At first glance the Privet Hawk Moth isn’t colourful at all. Its thorax is an inky black, and dark lines trace down its grey-brown wings. The colour, however, is hiding in the underwings and along its body, an embarrassed blush of pink, like it has been put through the wash with a pair of red socks. It is also enormous. Fully extended it has a wingspan of 12cm, and it is about half that from nose to tail. Sat quiescent on my eight-year-old’s hand, it seemed even more massive than that, and something about its heavy darkness gave it extra weight. A little winged black hole, watching resentfully.
Once it started to hum, threatening escape, I put it down inside a barn so that a bird wouldn’t eat it.
I can’t moth trap where I live now. I don’t even have a garden, and I doubt there are many moths living on the petrol-choked main road outside my window. I don’t even see birds. Moth populations have decreased by a third in the last fifty years, and this is always evident in trapping, so even if I did have access there’s no guarantee there would be many to take an interest in the light. There are many tiny cuts to ecological destruction. This is one that I feel more sharply than most.
Next time you see a moth perched resentfully on the outside of your window, staring at your side lamp, why not have a little mercy. Open the window all the way, turn on a few more lights, leave out a bowl of sugar syrup. Close your eyes and feel the fluttering against your face. You never know: you might like it.
*Lacanobia blenna, Hoplodrina octogenaria, Apamea furva, Parastichtis suspecta. Yes, they’re real. I promise.
*I’m sure a real ecologist wouldn’t admit to this view, there are several fascinating small brown moths. They are welcome to them. And I bet they’d still rather trap a Small Emperor.
