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| One of many moths in our home last night ... |
I know shamefully little about moths!
I could identify a brightly-coloured Burnet moth or a Cinnabar moth, but that is about all. I wasn't even sure when I began to type this post whether the offspring of the moth in the photo above were about to eat my clothes. It's about time I learned a bit more.
It is National Moth Week in North America, and although I'm UK-based, it seems a good idea to join in. I am very grateful to the self-styled novice naturalist of Rambling Woods for her inspiring post.
I have been an admirer of Canadian naturalist, Seabrooke Leckie's blog, The Marvelous in Nature, for some time now. You can read her post for National Moth Week here. Seabrooke has just co-authored The Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America with David Beadle.
Enjoy moth-spotting, and keep an eye on your wardrobe!*
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| Our colourful Burnet Moths |
* Note: Our UK clothes moth (Tineola biselliella - or Tineola bis-selliella, according to The Independent) does not flutter around our lights. It seeks out dark places like wardrobes for breeding. The egg-laying female is surprisingly small, perhaps a centimetre in length. After some days her eggs, often laid on our natural fibres, start to hatch into larvae. These can spend a year or two eating away at our best clothes! I will try to ensure that wardrobe doors are kept closed ...
I have an excellent book about moths, but there are so many micro-moths that are so difficult to identify that the book doesn't help there!
ReplyDeleteI think, brightly-coloured moths apart, I'm still at the stage where my moth curiosity is largely aroused by the fascination that moths bring to others. Butterflies, on the other hand, have me immediately entranced! Perhaps this imbalance will begin to even out as I observe more moths. We didn't encounter them often in Swansea but there are loads here.
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