Misunderstood moths are little marvels

MOTHS get a bit of a bad press, it seems, at least in comparison with their colourful butterfly cousins.

But that’s more based on myths and misunderstandings than any hard facts.

Drab, furry and stupid, they fly at candles, eat your clothes and lack the apparent grace, colour and beauty that we associate with butterflies. Or at least, that’s the perception.

But what about the delicate pale yellow colouring of the swallow-tailed moth, the gaudy attire of tiger moths, the unmistakeable markings of the cinnabar moth, or the six-spot burnet moth?

Some moths do have subtle colourings, but there are plenty which are every bit as beautiful as butterflies. There are some which fly by day and, of the 2,500 moths that live in Britain, only a few species eat clothes.

Some even have secret talents – like the death’s-head hawk-moth, which can squeak like a mouse or the Mother Shipton moth, which has a witch’s face on its wing. Spooky.

One man with more than a passing interest in moths is Mark Scott, whose naturalistweekly.com website was launched in April 2021.

Based in America, the site seeks to build a community focused around engaging and connecting with the natural world through prose and poetry.

Says Mark: “From paranormal podcasts to poems by Virginia Woolf, the site seeks to blend research with personal observation in order to create opportunities for the reader to connect with the natural world.”

His starting point for a series of four blog posts about moths was a celebration of National Moth Week, which began in 2012 in New Jersey and stemmed from an initiative in New Jersey that has grown into a global event that seeks “to promote the understanding and enjoyment of moths and to raise awareness about biodiversity.”

There are some 11,000 moth species in America, and they are important pollinators and provide food for many animals, birds, bats and spiders.

Mark goes on to examine The Poetry of Moths in a separate blog post, before focusing in more detail on The Death of a Moth, a 1942 essay in which the author observes a moth as it moves about her window.

As she ponders the moth’s movements, she begins to draw parallels between the moth’s life and the human experience – a little moth who is the embodiment of life, can “show us the true nature of life”, but at the same time help us also to contemplate the prospect of death.

Mark’s final post takes us to the role of moths at the movies, from the sinister Silence of the Lambs to The Mothman Prophecies.

In the UK, moth species outnumber butterflies by more than 40 to 1. They are closely related and, despite those myths, some moths are every bit as large and colourful as butterflies, the most dramatic being the hawk-moths: large, slow and fabulously patterned.

Some moths fly by day, some by night, and many use mimicry to protect themselves – around the world, moths resemble everything from wood slivers and broken twigs to bird droppings.

Their imaginative names, coined by Victorian naturalists, conjure up images of life in the ‘big house’, from satins, ermines and brocades to footmen and wainscots. But their numbers have been in sharp decline in some areas, sparking fears about collapsing eco-systems.

Back in 2013, Patrick Barkham highlighted concerns about declining numbers in southern England, with broadcaster Chris Packham, the vice-president of Butterfly Conservation, voicing concerns about habitat loss, light pollution and agricultural practices.

For more information about moths, see Butterfly Conservation’s website.