A Difference Between Birding & Mothing

Violet Dart
The blue shadows are an effect of the early morning light.

Yesterday morning I noticed this moth on the front of our house. It looked both unusual and familiar--I thought maybe I'd seen it before, either on the local Wawa wall or last year when my brother, the entomologist, set up his lights overnight. I couldn't find a picture of it in my hodge-podge collection of insects, so, as I usually do, I sent it to Harry.

It turned out to be a Violet Dart, a somewhat uncommon moth, with most records being from Massachusetts and New Jersey and most of those records clustered along the coast. That is, it isn't really a Pine Barrens species, though we obviously have lots of sand, which they prefer. I posted it on iNaturalist, since it was so unusual.

My brother doesn't think he's ever seen one, and if my brother hasn't seen one, that means that lots of lepidopterists haven't either. If I had found the avian equivalent of this moth, I'm not exactly sure what that might be but let's say a Painted Bunting, I'd be making appointments for birders to come see it at our house. But with a moth--no big reaction. They're here, they're gone, and staking out my property is a losing game. Besides, as my brother has pointed out, the area around our house is loaded with rare insects. So is yours. We just have to look harder for them. Some species may have already gone extinct outside your window. 

A little story about the word "mothing." Vladimir Nabokov, arguably the 20th century's greatest novelist, was also an expert lepidopterist (there is a whole set of butterflies that he did work on referred to as "Nabokov's blues"). His first novel written in English, Bend Sinister, was published in 1947. The last line of this rather pessimistic book about political tyranny is

                                                                                        A good night for mothing.

"Mothing" was a word virtually unknown in the late 40's.  The copy editor changed it to "nothing" assuming it was a typo, especially given the overall tone of the story. And yet, that one letter, n, changes the whole meaning of the ending. Fortunately, Nabokov, a stickler if there ever was one, changed it back. STET. Given the state of copy editing and proofreading nowadays (there is none), it gives me some perverse comfort that even 75 years ago, there were these potentially terrible lapses.