time of the moth . . .

Five-Spotted Sphinx (photo by Steve Boutte)

Thanx to Monica Boutte for passing along

Steve's fine photos....and for getting me to

thinkin' about moths.

Yeah, I know. You love the butterflies but think moths are sort of creepy. After all, no one has exactly jumped at the chance to create a horror movie about a giant butterfly come to kill us all. Yet enter Mothra(!)....if it wasn't for Godzilla that big crazy nocturnal insect woulda sucked every last one of us up thru its proboscis.

big, powerful fliers; sphinx moths are often mistaken

for some sort of crepuscular hummingbirds

(photo by Steve Boutte)

(Sigh) Anyway, it's moth time down South ya'll. In fact, it's Lepidopteran time, as late-summer/early-fall always hosts the largest and most diverse appearances of both butterflies and moths here along the Gulf Rim.

The first time I visited Charlotte Seidenberg's lovely wildlife garden just a couple of blocks away from the Mississippi River in uptown New Orleans, she couldn't/wouldn't get off the subject of moths. I wanted to talk about birds. She was going on and on about her favorite mothing spots “across the lake” (Ponchartrain) and have I ever seen this moth and that moth. Moth-woman!

diurnal and definitely wasp-like, this Clear-winged Moth

defies moth protocol, but has thus far escaped moth-excommunication

(photo by Bill Fontenot)

By the same token, she immediately gained my respect and admiration for digging such decidedly un-sexy creatures (though Steve Boutte's photos, featured here, surely indicate otherwise). So what I guess I mean is that it's refreshing to hang out with people whose fascination with Nature has taken them farther than the typical “gateway species” such as southern magnolia, flowering dogwood, butterflies, hummers, and songbirds.

back to Steve Boutte's fantasmagoric Five-Spotted Sphinx...

larval form of this species is the much-hated ('cept by thousands of species

of spiders, amphibians, reptiles, and birds) Tomato Hornworm

 

In her excellent 1995 book, The Wildlife Garden, Charlotte states that “There are 765 species of butterflies in North America, but 10,500 known species of moths!” Huh? So what's the deal, here? That kind of disparity in species diversity indicates that....hmmmm.....moths must be ecologically important. More important than butterflies perhaps. Important as what? Well, as plant pollinators for starters; and as food items for a massive number of creatures from spiders, toads/frogs, small snakes, lizards/skinks to birds, bats and other mammals of all makes and models.

tiny geometrid moths congregate on our bedroom window

(note reflection of some sort of important television

program happening in lower left....)

I love bird ecology – the way that particular bird species situate themselves within particular habitat types; what all they do there, how they do it, and when they do it. My old college buddy Wylie Barrow is a bird ecologist at the National Wetlands Research Center here in Lafayette. We have a mutual fascination regarding which birds eat what foods and when and where they do it. It was after many hours of conversation – and many more hours of Wylie's fieldwork in the cheniere forests along coastal Cameron parish – that we came to a truly cool conclusion regarding migratory songbirds and the food items which are absolutely crucial to their survival as they make their long twice-yearly treks between the temperate and tropical Americas:

Here in coastal Louisiana, roughly the halfway point in the annual migratory route for numerous species of migratory songbirds, the arrival of the bulk of spring-migrating warblers dovetails perfectly with the peak outbreak of geometrid moth larvae (very tiny white/naked caterpillars or “worms”), which the warblers (and other songbirds) attack with gusto. By summer's end, these same geometrids only now adult moths, are out in profusion. In coastal cheneires, these tiny moths roost beneath the leaves of various plants, especially those of giant ragweed, which develops profuse thickets in coastal Louisiana. So guess what? The same warblers and other songbirds, now with offspring in tow and now coursing southward toward the tropics, stop off at the same coastal habitats and now feast on the same moth species – now adults instead of “worms” – utilizing them as a major/crucial food source in the same way that they did with the larvae in the spring.

It's all just so uncannily amazing.

Once you think about it, however, especially from an evolutionary/survival-of-the-fittest perspective, it becomes apparent that those migratory birds which time their stateside arrivals and departures to coincide with geometrid moth outbreaks are the ones that ultimately survive best, passing their now-hardwired sense of migratory timing on to their descendents via DNA. The same scenario holds true for all traveling animals. Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are another example. How is it that they know to hold off on their northbound trans-gulf spring migration route until stateside native nectar sources such as red buckeye, eastern coralbean, and trumpet honeysuckle come into bloom? Are they geniuses or something? Have they engineered such solutions via computers and think-tanks and what-have-you?

Nope. More like idiot-savants: they just do what their Creator tells them to do. Creation has never stopped, ya'll. If it did, animals would no longer know what to eat and when and where to eat it. No, the process continues, with new life forms evolving by the year...by the day...really, moment to moment in time.

Self-conscious ever-analyzing humans find such revealations “amazing,” “incredible,” and “genius.”

“Meanwhile,” as Bob Dylan sang, “life goes on all around us.” It's just another day in paradise...

Vine Sphinx

(photo by Steve Boutte)

I don't want to end this post without bragging a lil' more on Charlotte Seidenberg and her talents not only as a naturalist but as a writer as well. She ain't no spring chicken (I know she's older than me, for example...) but in her love for all living things she's more like a kid than an adult. She even looks more like a kid than an adult. She grew up but she never grew out of that innate fascination with Nature that all of us are born with. In demeanor, she's on the shy side – unless she's talking or writing about Nature. Then she becomes a firey preacher: “...I defy you not to become as intrigued as I with indigenous plants and animals...I defy you not to be as fascinated as I with the complexity and beauty of our native insect life....My garden is becoming a place for learning about the natural world. And the more I know the more I want to know...” she writes in the introduction of The Wildlife Garden.

I know she'd be embarrassed if she read this; but she echos the sentiments of so many of us, particularly in the darkening times in which we live today.

Charlotte writes from a first-person perspective, peppering her books with personal stories. That's what makes them so repeatedly readable. But then she also researches her topics to within inches of their lives. Check out her The New Orleans Garden (1990) for example. I know she had to be cross-eyed for at least a few months after all the microfiche she must have perused in order to determine earliest dates of introduction for three centuries' worth of the hundreds of plants entering the garden scene in New Orleans. Ditto for The Wildlife Garden. Read 'em; and I defy you to believe otherwise.

Oh, and . . . Long Live the Moth!