Category: moths

Last night as Dan was going to bed he told me there were a couple of moths at the front door. It had been a lovely afternoon, very spring-like in its mildness, but it was still quite chilly by the time the sun set. When I went down to check out the moths, the thermometer read 2°C (35°F), which is hardly a temperature that a moth should be out and about at.

But some of my surprise disappeared when I saw which species the two moths were. Both at the front light, and three more individuals at the back light, were Bruce Spanworms (Operophtera bruceata). Up here where I live, these are usually the last species of moth I see flying each fall. They’re particularly cold-hardy and I often see them active at temperatures that would keep most other species from flying (such as last night). They’re frequently seen out and about during the day, too, pale fluttery insects that catch the low autumn sun on mild afternoons.

The appearance of the Bruce Spanworms heralds the end to the mothing season for this year. Now that it’s November (how did that happen?) there may only be a couple more nights where the temperatures are warm enough for stuff to be flying, and like last night, they’ll likely be mostly these spanworms. Time to pack up the lights and the sheet and the jars for another year. They’ll be tucked away in the basement for the next four months, awaiting the first moth of spring on a mild evening in March.

It’s starting to get late in the season for moths. I’ll still see the odd one through mid-November, probably, but the numbers and diversity are rapidly decreasing. Most nights are single-digits Celsius and the warmer nights tend to be rainy, so I don’t put my light out often – the return isn’t usually worth the energy expended (mine or the electricity). That said, though, every now and then I’m happily surprised at what turns up.

Last week, for instance, I put my light out one warmish evening. I only got a dozen moths or so, but one of them was the above. I didn’t immediately recognize it – itself a sign that it’s probably something unusual, or at least a new species for me (still being a relative youngster in the mothing world, at just four and a half seasons’ experience, this still happens with some regularity). So I jarred it up and put it in the fridge to get a photo and ID the following day.

I had my suspicions about the ID – my gut instinct was a type of groundling. I opened my folder of guidebook jpgs in Windows Explorer and searched the images for ‘groundling’… but neither seemed right. So I tried a few other possibilities that were my second guesses, and when they proved unsuccessful I went back to the start of the noctuids and began scanning one by one. It turned out I’d been right – it was a type of groundling, but its common name didn’t contain the word groundling so it didn’t come up in my search. This is The Cobbler, Condica sutor, indeed a species I hadn’t seen yet. Happy with the ID, I labeled it and filed it away.

The following day I was working some more on the moth guide proofs and happened to notice the species account for The Cobbler. Its map, I noted, seemed to indicate that the species was Carolinian and south in distribution. It only snuck into Ontario in the southwest. My Ontario annotated checklist confirmed this. I’m quite some distance from southwestern Ontario… did I have the ID wrong?

Chris Schmidt at the Canadian National Collection in Ottawa (with whom I’d been corresponding about some stuff for the guide proofs) confirmed it for me: yes, it was The Cobbler. The species is migratory and prone to wandering in the fall, with records occasionally outside of its usual range. And while my house is quite a long way out of its range, it’s not impossible. Still, the Ontario checklist gives Guelph as the closest Ontario record; the guide to Québec moths has no records at all. The records from BugGuide are all mostly southern, with the exception of one in Illinois. So that’s pretty cool.

Then a couple of nights ago I noticed a moth hanging on the screen of one of our ground floor windows, attracted to the light from the floor lamp there. It was clearly a geometer by the spread wings, but it wasn’t the shape of any of the geos that are familiarly flying right now, so I went around to check it out. This one was easier to ID, since it’s a common enough moth: it’s a Four-barred Gray, Aethalura intertexta.

What’s unusual about it is the timing. I haven’t seen a gray in weeks, going on months. Curious, I checked the flight period indicated in our guide: April through August, it said. BugGuide has images from April through July. All but one of my personal records are from April and May; that one exception is from August. Sooo…. mid-October? What was it thinking?

This one was unusual only in that I’d never seen the species before. This is a Dark Grass-Tubeworm, Acrolophus morus. It had been sitting on the outside of the back door at Dan’s mom’s house when we were there at Thanksgiving. We were preparing to head back home after an enjoyable weekend of visiting, so there was some activity as we went in and out of the house, but the moth didn’t seem to mind. Dan was the one to point it out to me. I had a feeling what it was but had to wait till I got home to confirm.

And finally… this one is a Juniper Carpet, Thera juniperata. It was hanging out on the front door of Dan’s mom’s house (seems to be a mothy place there). It’s uncommon, but not unusual, seen annually in small numbers. I mostly include it because this was the first individual I’d seen this season; I’ve since seen one additional here at home, but that’s been all. And they’re nice-looking moths, don’t you think?

A little while ago Dan brought a caterpillar up to my study where I was working at my computer. It was a big guy, the size of my thumb, fuzzy black with bright red bands between the body segments. It was a Giant Leopard Moth (Hypercompe scribonia), perhaps my favourite caterpillar species. The first time I encountered this species was at the lake house a few years ago. I got the adults to my moth light, first, and later found a caterpillar in our yard. For whatever reason the species was high on my must-see list, so I was pretty stoked when I found the first one.

When we moved I was a little disappointed to be leaving them behind. The lake house was in a unique area where the habitat has many Carolinian characteristics and a number of typically more southern species are present, but our new house, about 35 km north, was outside of that pocket. We don’t have Cerulean Warblers or Black Rat Snakes here, no Yellow-throated Vireos or Five-lined Skinks. Or Giant Leopard Moths, I thought.

But then, a couple months after we’d moved, Dan brought me a fuzzy black caterpillar with red bands. I was surprised and delighted, but also puzzled. At the time I was just getting started on the range maps for the moth field guide. To draw them I’d comb the printed and online data I had available for each species and compile the data points into an understanding of the ecoregions each moth was associated with. All of the data I had indicated that Giant Leopard Moth was a species of Carolinian forests and those southward. In Ontario, the Carolinian region is restricted to the southwest, with some species also present in the Kingston region (the area of our lake house) at the east end of Lake Ontario. Our new house is most definitely not in the Carolinian zone; it straddles the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes and Southern Shield ecoregions, with a little bit of both habitats. So what was the Giant Leopard Moth doing all the way up here?

I still don’t have an answer to that. But I’m happy they’re here.

When Dan brought it to me, the caterpillar was curled into itself in the typical defensive position of most tiger moth (fuzzy) caterpillars. The spines can irritate soft skin and mucus membranes, so the posture is a defense mechanism, dissuading potential predators from picking them up. Wanting to get photos, I let the caterpillar sit on my desk while I continued working, and after about five minutes it decided the threat had passed and uncurled itself. It crawled up on my hand when I placed it in its path, and I grabbed my camera to head outside.

And then the caterpillar did a funny thing: it paused in its crawling and started pinching my skin with its mandibles as if I were a leaf it wanted to chew a piece off of. Though great for ripping through leaves, the little mandibles weren’t large or strong enough to do anything; it felt as though someone was trying to lightly pinch my skin with a pair of tweezers. It tried briefly at one spot then crawled to another and tried there… I’m not sure what it was trying to accomplish. Was it really trying to feed? Or was it trying to persuade me to put it down? I didn’t keep it long, in any case. I took a few photos, then let it go at the base of a tree. It was probably on its way to find a secure nook to curl up for the winter; it’ll awake in the spring, finish feeding and pupate, and then emerge as an adult in June.