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. 

Backyard Beetles & Moths

Imperial Moth

My brother, who has been coming to the Pine Barrens for more than 30 years for lepidoptery and other insects (beetles, mostly), set up his lights and sheets in our backyard last night to do some mothing. While he was setting up, I told him the story about Vladmir Nabokov's novel, Bend Sinister. Nabokov, who was, in addition to being one of the greatest, if not the greatest, writer of the 20th century, was also an expert lepidopterist and he often inserted references to moths and butterflies in his work. The last line of the novel is, "A good night for mothing." In the first edition of the book, the copy editor, never having seen the word, changed it to "A good night for nothing."  

Harry said that people who bird are of course, "birders," but people who go mothing have a hard time since they don't want to be confused with "mothers." 

His mothing array wasn't very elaborate: two sheets, one draped over our picnic table, the other over a couple of chairs, a pair of ultra-violet lights and an incandescent 180-watt bulb, a very long extension cord, and he was all set. He also went into the woods in back and smeared bait on the trees. The bait is a mixture of beer, fermented bananas, brown sugar and, I think, molasses. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, like bait for fishing. Last night, it didn't work. 

Polyphylla variolosa

As soon as it got dark, we had some activity, though at first, they were mostly beetles. There were two kinds of rather large beetles, both of which would go under the rubric June bug, though, as Harry pointed out, that's like saying "warbler" or "sparrow." It doesn't tell you much. Harry doesn't traffic much in common names, but the interesting beetle to him, and me, was Polyphylla variolosa, with big, feathery antennae. There are only two representatives of this genus, I believe he said, on the east coast, and this is the one you'll find in the Pine Barrens. 

He went to check his bait and I heard him call out "Ho ho," and what he came back with was not a moth, but a caterpillar that he called a "filament" something or other because of the long spike protruding from its thorax. They feed on greenbrier, of which there is plenty to feed on around here. Since he found it on the bark of a tree, he suspects it was looking for a place to pupate. It will now pupate in Westchester County, NY. 

"Filament caterpillar"

Not many moths were showing up on the sheet. I was amazed at how many of the Polyphylla we were attracting, but the one species of moth he found interesting was a Gracilis Underwing, an example of which I remembered seeing on the Wawa wall before they renovated and changed the lights. Around 11 he left for his motel, but he left the lights on. At 5:30 this morning he was back to see what had come in overnight. To me, it just looked like a smattering of uninteresting little insects, but to him, those nondescript moths are very interesting. He also told me that you have to carefully look underneath the drapes and folds of the sheet, because they often work their way in there. Sure enough, when he took the sheet off the two chairs, there on the seat, was a beauty of an Imperial Moth. And then, from underneath the table, he extracted a perfect specimen of an Apple Sphinx Moth. Along with the rare fly he found last night, he was pretty happy with his haul, since of the 3 families of moths he is most interested in, he'd found an example of each.

Apple Sphinx Moth

And then he found the really interesting moth, sitting inside the lip of his lamp. At first he thought it was Cactoblastis cactorum, but what surprised him was that its range map doesn't include New Jersey. It turned out to be Melitara prodenialis.  The caterpillars of this moth feed on prickly pear cactus, of which, again, there is plenty of around here.  There are other records of this moth in New Jersey, but not a lot, and oddly, there is a gap between NJ and North Carolina where the moth has not been recorded. Obviously, prickly pear is all along that stretch. If nothing else, if my brother hasn't come across one in his decades of mothing in New Jersey, you can be sure it is rare.

And right in my own backyard. 

Melitara prodenialis

Large Maple Spanworm

Waretown Wawa Teardown

I was driving north on Route 9 yesterday in Waretown when I saw a cloud of dust up ahead. As I approached the traffic light at Wells Mills Road, I saw that the cloud was rising from what was the Wawa Market as an orange excavator smashed down repeatedly on its roof tearing big chunks of the building away.

In happier days

Now, this was never my favorite Wawa. It was on an oddly shaped plot, it was hard to get into (a tough left turn off 9) and harder to get out of (an impossible left turn onto Wells Mills) and it was shabby inside, but, it was a Wawa, and if you didn't stop at the one at Barnegat, you had to drive all the way up to Lacey for the next one (like a whole 3 miles).  Because the land it was standing on was small and of an indescribable geometric shape, there is no room to rebuild it as a "Super Wawa" (i.e. "gas station"), so there is one less Wawa in the world.

It's been a bad month for Wawas: my local one in Whiting has been closed down for renovation since Oct 22 (not to reopen until the 22nd of this month), which has meant no end of inconvenience for me and my brother & I fear that with the alterations made to the exterior of the building, plus new lighting it will cease to be a mothing hot spot. The equivalent of a nice patch of birding habitat getting mowed down, except that it really isn't ideal for moths to cling to the surface of a building out in the open--easy pickings for predators, not to mention "hunters." We really won't know until spring what the change means for lepidoptera in Whiting until the spring. Not many winter moths around.

Moths on a Wawa's Walls & Windows

Polyphemus Moth

Last week, as I was leaving my local Wawa, I saw three low-lifes looking intently at something on the front wall. One of them picked it off the wall and showed it to the other two. It turned out to be a moth on the wall and one of the  low-lifes turned out to be my brother, who, among his many accomplishments, is an expert, semi-pro lepidopterist. The other two had seen him checking the walls, as he has for many years on his trips into the Pine Barrens, and since it is easier to explain what you're doing than get rid of somebody, he was giving them an impromptu lesson in entomology.

Giant Leopard Moth

It took some doing, but I finally managed to get his attention (he had assumed that I was yet another denizen of the Wawa parking lot) and, after he got over the surprise of seeing me, he showed me what had been on the wall: a Giant Leopard Moth. It wasn't a particularly good specimen since its lower wings were worn and translucent, but, still, it was  impressive to find it on the Wawa wall. At least to me. To him--meh.

My local Wawa, my brother discovered many years ago, is to moths what Mercer Corporate Park or Marshall's Pond is to birds--a spot that inexplicably attracts interesting specimens. He has been picking off the walls moths and other insects (his interests extend deep into beetle family of which there are more species than any other) long before we ever moved down here. He had told me that this was a mothing hot spot but it wasn't until we took a quick tour around the store that I realized just how amazing it was.

One of the aspects of birding that first attracted me was the idea that there was an alternate universe going on all around you, full of birds with their field marks, songs, and behaviors, and if you just looked and studied for a while, you could easily enter that universe. And here, at the Wawa 2 1/2 miles from my house, was a miniverse I could also enter, because, with 10 times more moths than birds, I have no intention of ever trying to learn them. I have an app for that: it's called Email Harry. I'm only going to be interested in the moths on the Wawa walls (and windows). And, according to my brother, I don't have to worry about other Wawas because only this one--whether there is something in the lights, or the texture of the walls, or its proximity to the Pine Barrens, or a combination of those factors he doesn't know--attracts the diversity of moths this one does.

So for the last week, every time I've stopped there I've checked the walls and, using the Harry App, this is some of what I've found:

Imperial Moth

Rosy Maple Moth

Painted Lichen Moth

Black-waved Flannel Moth

Mind you, these are all on the walls of one Wawa! And since the moths are absorbing & storing heat during the day to use as energy for nocturnal flight, they don't move around like those damn birds.

Of course, there's nothing like being with an expert, so this morning I met Harry at Wawa around 6:30 in the morning. That Polyphemus Moth above (a male, you can tell by the antennae) was the highlight, but we also saw a couple of examples of this peculiar specimen:

Datana

which looks like a curled up leaf--great camouflage in most circumstances--on a white concrete wall, not so much.

Harry was reeling off the names of so many moths that I could barely keep up--Banded Tussock Moth, Gracilis Underwing, Spiny Oak Slug Moth, White-blotched Heterocampa. None of these moths are particularly photogenic. To the expert, the big showy butterflies and moths are not at all interesting. It is the small, gray, or brown moths and butterflies, stuff you'd hardly notice as anything more than a bug, that really starts their engines. 

Of course, there are other kinds of insects clinging the walls there (Fish Flies, which are gigantic are prominent) and just because it has a bird in its name, I took this picture of an Owl Fly. No idea why it has this common name.

Owl Fly

At one point, as we were circling the store, the manager came out to see what was up with us--someone thought we might be trying to break in (of course we'd be trying to break in to an open store, of course) and Harry, who has the patter down pat, explained to him that we were just looking at the insect life on his walls. He was cool with that, but then, five minutes later, a Manchester police officer pulled up. There had a been a report of a couple of guys looking confused in the parking lot and, in this area with the all the old folks, they worry about silver alerts, so, after we assured him that we were not, in fact, demented (though, perhaps, a little eccentric), and showed him our i.d's, he allowed as how it was pretty cool what we were doing and gave headquarters a 10-4 on the suspicious old guys of Wawa. I find it ironic that if you're an old guy with lots of tattoos, eating your bagel using the garbage bin as a table talking to your other tattooed cronies in a loud voice, spouting stupid political opinions while other dimwits rev their motorcycle engines and a couple of harridans cackle at their lewd jokes, no one sends for the police, but let a couple of guys stare at a what looks like a blank wall and the cops come a-running.