Moths Transforming
Archer has found a shrunken, radioactive lobster in our backyard river. At least, that’s what this crawdad looks like in the beam of a UV flashlight. We’ve seen plenty of crawdads in our day. But since they are nocturnal and it’s well past ten o’clock, the river is crawling with numbers we didn’t expect. And under ultraviolet, or UV, light—purple wavelengths that are even shorter and denser than blue ones—this animal seems to be glowing.
“Should I pick him up?” Archer asks. Before I can answer, his hand is in the water and the crawdad is pinching. Archer says, “He’s really trying to get me!”
Archer doesn’t hold the animal for long. Catching and releasing crawdads and salamanders and fireflies is how he’s come to have a relationship with the natural world, though as he has gotten older, his time outdoors has lessened. It seems a sad passage, the notion that communing is something he will outgrow. Then again, I’ve been around for a long time, and I’m the one who instigated this wacky UV-light expedition.
Back in the 1990s, I had a black light that amped up the wow factor of posters that lined the walls of my bedroom, technicolor dreams hovering over incense burners. Because of this, black lights always rouse nostalgia. They were some of the first tools I ever had to gain perspective on how light spectra might alter the world—and the way I felt in it. So when I came across an article about biofluorescence, I was intrigued.
Bioluminescence occurs when an animal produces light through chemical reactions in its body. Biofluorescence occurs when an animal absorbs and re-emits light. It’s found in reptiles, fish, birds, and invertebrates—and, to the recent surprise of many field researchers, mammals—as they absorb short-wave light and reveal it via skin and fur as longer wavelengths that are visible to human eyes with the assistance of UV devices.
The accessibility of UV flashlights has led to an onslaught of biofluorescent discoveries in surprising places, including New Jersey parking lots. I’m not sure if the crawdad species Archer has found is known to be biofluorescent, but it’s certainly interesting. These flashlights have turned our backyard into an immersive hallucination. Out here, he’s about as swashbuckling as a twelve-year-old can get.
When we step out of the river, our feet sink into loam, and we’re swarmed by beating moth wings. I turn my flashlight off to stop the bombardment. “They must like UV light,” Archer says. “I think they’re attracted to it.”
From behind a riverside buckeye tree, an animal starts clicking. I think it’s a sound that racoon mothers make to calm their children when they’re nervous. It’s making me feel like I should tell my child to clear the area. But before I can speak, Archer’s on the move.
“We need to get out of here,” he says. It isn’t the racoon that’s spooked him; it’s the insects. He’s wearing a white shirt and they’re flocking to it. One flies down his neck, becoming trapped between skin and cotton. “Better to be shirtless than to have that happening,” he says, stripping until he’s half-naked in a cloud of wings.
The hill leading back to our house is a steep one. As we climb, more moths appear, too fast for us to really see them as they bang against a flashlight. “I can’t believe how much is going on out here,” Archer says. The intensity of life in darkness, so often thought of as negative space, is astounding. Even after my encounters with fireflies and salamanders, there’s a bounty of activity here that I, too, find somehow surprising.
Archer has spent the day at a county-run day camp. “I found a butterfly today,” he says, matching my stride as we heave-ho our way uphill. “I mean, I thought it was a butterfly. But now I’m wondering if it could have been a moth. I’ve never really thought about moths before.”
Twenty minutes outdoors with a UV flashlight and, already, his understanding of the world is being reshaped. “What did it look like?” I ask.
“It was big. Like, the biggest butterfly I’ve ever seen.”
Once we’re inside, steeping in artificial light, I pull up a photo of a cecropia moth, the largest moth species in North America. Archer taps my phone screen, enlarging the image of crescent moon–patterned wings. “That looks like the one I found!” he says.
“Amazing! Dead or alive?”
“Dead,” he says. “But that moth was so cool I put him behind some rocks so the other kids wouldn’t step on him.”
“Do you think the moth’s still there?”
“Yeah,” Archer says. “I hid him really well. If I hadn’t, he would’ve gotten smashed.”
In recent years, Archer has evolved from a child who prefers to go barefoot to one who covets designer sneakers, but he, like me, still considers natural findings to be gifts. In our house, windowsills are crowded with artifacts that we use to document walks and river trips: a hummingbird’s fallen nest. A robin’s egg. Driftwood, sun bleached.
It’s getting late. Still, this seems worth exploring.
“Should we go into town and try to find that moth?”
Archer tilts his head, curious. “Let’s do it!” he says.
We’ve left our UV lights behind, but we’re both wearing headlamps when we arrive at the recreation center. Archer pulls his light off immediately. “Guess we don’t need these,” he says.
It’s nearing midnight. There’s no one in the parking lot. The tennis courts are clear, but stadium-size lights are blaring. Under newly installed LED security lights, it doesn’t feel like we’re on a nocturnal outdoor adventure at all. It feels like we’ve driven into a surgical suite the size of an airplane hangar. It suddenly strikes me as strange that, given all the things that our culture claims people should be personally responsible for securing—health care, for instance—we’re almost uniformly obsessed with providing communal lighting.
I suspect the bubble of light we’ve entered, in a parking lot as large as a downtown block, has something to do with the fallen cecropia moth. No one knows for sure why moths are attracted to artificial light, but one theory is that they use the moon to navigate, holding it as a fixed point of reference. Lightbulbs are concentrated energy that, mimicking the moon, rattle their senses.
Some researchers think that, without access to the true moon to guide them, they’re at a loss about which way to travel. What’s known for sure is that, when enticed by artificial light, moths don’t know what to do with themselves. They fly in circles trying to figure out where they should go, how they might navigate. A moth that becomes disoriented by light stands to be, in essence, energized to death.
In this age of entertainment and never-ending social media scrolling, this feels a little close. For both moth and human physiology, artificial light is a stimulant. And, under the influence of it, I get caught in echo chambers myself. I’m not sure that I know anyone who doesn’t, at least on occasion.
Archer leads me around the gym, which has a wall of glass lit from the inside with no blinds. The indoor light is met by the illumination of an outdoor security light. Everything in sight appears to be burning, and we are the only two humans here to see it. The grassy space where children play in daylight is here, in the depths of night, brighter than my living room with every lamp turned on. It seems, in fact, brighter than any place I’ve been in recent memory.
Pressed between the exterior of that plate glass window and the lamppost, there’s a small swath of landscaping stone. And along its edge, sheltered by my son, the finder, is an intact cecropia moth.
This is a perfect specimen of the largest moth in North America, laid flat against stones that match its sheen. The moth, perfectly preserved, appears to be part of an open-air museum exhibit. Archer has carried a piece of paper from the car. He jimmies his fingers under the moth’s wings and lifts the creature onto the paper, lest we damage wings in transport. On the drive home, he holds the paper with both hands open, like a wedding-ring bearer who’s been entrusted with platinum bands.
To make it to this stage of life, the cecropia began as an egg last year, likely on the leaf of a maple or cherry tree, the plants they prefer. When hatched, a tiny caterpillar depended on leaves for food. In the span of a month, the caterpillar shed skin four times, in stages known as instars. In full-size caterpillar form, at the time of pupation, the caterpillar likely chose a branch to attach to, spinning a cocoon of silk that blended perfectly with tree bark. In this warm interior, the insect became a pupa. For ten months, this creature rested in that dark space, camouflaged from hungry animals. Then, almost a year from when the process began, the cecropia pushed out of a container of isolation to become what we’re seeing.
A cecropia’s adult life is short; their sole responsibility is to mate and ensure future generations. I find myself hoping that this moth connected with others before getting lost in municipal lighting. It’s probable, since cecropia pheromones are detectable up to a mile away. This magnificent moth has, in all its forms, escaped ravenous squirrels and songbirds and owls only to be taken down by lightbulbs.
When we get home, Archer sits the moth on a countertop and starts researching. “Cecropia have wings up to seven inches,” he announces while ransacking a junk drawer. He produces a measuring tape for positive confirmation. This moth measures more than seven inches across. It takes both of my hands—which, placed side by side, mirror the shape of moth wings—to hold it completely.
“If this is the largest moth in North America, what’s the largest in the world?” Archer wonders. The answer: Australian atlas. He finds a cell phone app that makes it look like the exotic moth is in the kitchen next to us and holds it up next to the cecropia as if to measure the two against each other. The atlas, which shares similar warm-tone coloring, is no more magnificent than the cecropia moths that fly through these hills.
This moth is a reminder that we live in a temperate rainforest, a haven of biodiversity that, each year, slips a little further from being a sustainable harbor. On light pollution maps, the Appalachian chain is discernible, because it offers a slight East Coast swath of natural night that’s hanging on, but just barely. I’ve heard that dragonflies with three-foot wingspans once zoomed through Ohio and West Virginia. Those creatures were alive when dinosaurs roamed the world. Yet night still holds and hides beauties like this. In the here and now, not some golden-day past.
As I try to figure out where we might put the moth, I remember a spare shadowbox that’s been tucked into a closet. It is like the frames that natural history museums use to display pinned butterflies and moths. For years, I’ve used shadowboxes to frame found objects like river glass, delighted by the act of turning what might be seen as disposable into something of value by simply reframing it. Into this box, the moth’s wings will fit like a puzzle piece. But how does one go about mounting an insect?
I look up as Archer jostles the piece of paper before suddenly jumping back. “Did you see that?” he asks. I nod. Our moth specimen just moved. “Alive, alive!” We take turns screaming enthusiastically.
Archer shifts the paper again. The moth responds by lifting his wings languidly. “What should we do?” Archer asks.
“Maybe we should offer some sugar water or a piece of fruit?” I venture.
We soon learn that cecropia moths cannot eat or drink. A cecropia moth’s only option is to expend energy, pushing it toward future generations. “I wish we could take this moth to a wildlife center for help,” Archer says.
But even in top form, giant silkworm moths like cecropias only live ten days or so. There’s nothing for us to do. This is not a riddle to be solved. It’s not a problem we can fix. When it comes to saving this moth, we are helpless, and it is an unwelcome sensation. It’s also a tangible facing of the fact that, regardless of how we attempt to avoid it, none of us will go on living forever. We leave the moth on our kitchen counter, wings splayed across paper like watercolor.
When I wake the next morning, there is a small part of me that believes we might find the moth flying around our house. But the cecropia—with his large, feathery antennae—is exactly where we left him. We leave him undisturbed until lunch preparations require relocation, determined to keep him as comfortable as we can.
The shadowbox comes with a backboard covered in black velour. I flip it inside out so that the box is not an enclosure but, rather, a pedestal. Then, gently as I can, I put an index finger on each side of the moth’s orange-and-cream-striped body to lift him like a paramedic. The animal’s legs are shrunken. But he is not yet dead. His half-moon markings look like celestial bodies, but scientists think they evolved to mimic the eyes of snakes or owls to make predators hesitate on approach. The patterns are protective.
Once the motionless cecropia is on his throne, I tap the backboard to see if he is still alive. He raises both wings, surprisingly strong and wide. Still unsure of where to move him, I put the inside-out shadowbox on my desk. This is the place I spend much of my waking life. It’s away from the bustle of the kitchen and the low surfaces of my living room, where my dog might try to grab the moth as a snack.
Later, as I check email with the cecropia by my side, I sense the harshness of my office’s overhead lights. I feel the blue spectrum of my computer screen. All the artificial lights of my office are hitting the moth’s wings. There is maybe no scene I’m more familiar with than the one from my office chair. But suddenly, I’m seeing it from a moth’s perspective, and it changes things.
I turn off my office lights. I turn off my computer screen. I leave my window blinds cracked, so that the cecropia will have the natural ebb and flow of day and night as miniature seasons experienced from an inside-out shadowbox that’s balanced on my ink-jet printer.
I cannot sustain this creature. I cannot revive him with sugar water. I cannot do much of anything to ease his journey. As we rest there together, I realize that the only solace I can offer this cecropia is the darkness that he has been denied. But maybe, in an overlit world, this is no small thing.
I sit with the dying moth, day after day, night after night. I move from tapping the board every so often to waving my hand in front of his wings. I do not touch his corporeal being, but the moth senses me. I sweep my hands, churning air. The moth lifts his wings. It feels like sorcery.
Sometimes, when I’m close, my breath tousles his furry head, and it is enough to inspire a slight tapping of his half-moons against velour. I’ve had call-and-response communications with plenty of domestic animals, but not often wildlife. Then again, I’m beginning to think that’s only because I haven’t really been paying attention.
Human conversations with wild creatures are always happening. It’s just that we don’t realize it—so the conversations remain sadly one-sided. I’ve been unintentionally calling moths with artificial light all my life, but I’ve barely made out their responses, ignoring the fact that their actions had much to do with mine.
Aside from his shriveled legs, this moth looks fit. His wings, studied closely, remind me of wild rabbit fur, and his unruly orange head is akin to nothing I’ve ever seen outside of the Muppets. I grow to love him. Sometimes, when returning to my office after long hours away, I lean in and whisper, “Are you still here?” To this, the moth always answers with a gentle wing lift. We go on like this.
My call is always the same, but, in time, the moth’s response begins to fade. Only once do I carry the moth from his perch by my office window, into full daylight, when family friends are visiting. The youngest among them holds out his hand, to measure the moth in relation to his own body, and asks of the giant cecropia, a creature wilder than he ever imagined might exist, “Is that real?” To almost everyone who encounters the cecropia, the concept that this massive beauty exists in close proximity unnoticed seems, at first, unbelievable.
Outdoors, this immobile moth would likely have already been eaten by a bird or blown into soil. I’ve removed this insect from the very cycles I long to connect with. But the moth has become an unexpected companion, deliverer of some wordless wisdom.
Each time the moth and I meet, he gently beats his wings against the backboard of the shadowbox, half-moons rising and falling. I try not to disturb him too often, and I take seriously my duty to guard his access to darkness. Incrementally, his wing movements weaken. It’s uncomfortable to witness. It is, frankly, a little scary. I watch the moth’s energy fade until, finally, his wings go dormant.
“Where did you go?” I whisper one afternoon, though I know there will be no answer. Only the outline of the cecropia’s wings, the shape of two question marks, almost touching.
We have spent nearly ten days together, almost surely this moth’s entire adult life. There happens to be a moon calendar clipped to my window blinds, so the cecropia’s place of death is marked with hand-drawn moons etched as though on a tombstone. They map the nights that this moth lived. They show that, during our time together, the moon was continually progressing from a mere wink to a wide-open eye. While this moth with half-moons on his wings expended his last bit of energy, the actual moon—as seen through my office window—was reaching its height of light.
I cannot bear to pin this moth down like a museum specimen, so I place two pearl-tipped pins in velour to hold him upright, hooked under the crooks of his wings the way I looped my hands under Archer’s arms to lift him when he was a baby.
I have seen live moths. I have seen dead moths. But never have I been through this process of watching life drain from a winged creature before. When I look at the moth’s body, I cannot help but feel like his energy is hovering in the air around me.
I leave the cecropia alone for a few days, until one afternoon, when it feels right for reasons I cannot explain, I ceremoniously flip the backboard. The pedestal on which this moth has lived and died transforms, immediately, into a display case. There is still a slight impulse to take the moth out, to bury him, return him to cycles outside. But it is tempered by the memory of the child who asked, when this moth was alive, if he was real. I decide that the cecropia, in death, has things to teach by simply staying visible.
I stand there for a long time, holding the box of darkness, unsure of where to put it. I’ve always appreciated shadowboxes because they leave space for depth instead of pressing everything they hold against the hard limits of glass. How odd it is that we speak of shadows as voids when they are the very definition of a presence. Light flowing around something, the way ripples reveal rocks in a river.
My cecropia encounter would have been a gift at any time. But the arrival of this moth could not have come at a more auspicious moment. On the night Archer had his moth-centric revelation, I was already planning a road trip to attend Mothapalooza, a moth-lauding festival held annually by Arc of Appalachia, a nonprofit organization with vast acreage under its protection in Ohio.
Every summer, the Mothapalooza festival erects larger-than-life lanterns. After sunset, these luminarias—some of which look, from a distance, like curved cathedral windows scattered through woodlands—lure moths from the sanctuary’s dark forests so that moth-ers, the moth-loving equivalent of birders, might be able to get a look at them. I am now, more than ever, eager to join them, though my enthusiasm about drawing moths with artificial light has been tempered.
It seems like folly to travel up a mountain range to find what’s surely all around me. But, as with so many nocturnal life-forms, I’m not only lacking in how to locate moths—I’m not sure how to relate to them. And Mothapalooza is full of people who’ve spent years considering moth-human relations.
As soon as I arrive, I run into an experienced moth-er, Jim McCormac, one of the festival’s founders. He’s loitering near a picnic shelter, where he’s set up a light station that hasn’t had time to draw much attention. It isn’t so much the white sheet he’s erected on the side of the shelter that draws my interest. It’s that he’s holding a gigantic UV flashlight.
He isn’t haphazardly walking around with his light, as Archer and I did with ours; he’s fixed his beam on the forest overstory, which is awash in purple light beams. When I walk over, he says, with barely an introduction, “I want to do a lot of looking around for cats tonight.” He takes my silence as confusion. Which, admittedly, it is. “Caterpillars, I mean,” he says. “I just call them cats.” This is, I will learn, a classic moth-er reference.
Jim started Mothapalooza with a fellow enthusiast, and he can still remember his inspiration. He was sitting in a ditch when the concept came to him. He’d just found a moth. It might have been a cecropia, if he remembers correctly. Jim says, “I told the guy I was with, ‘You know, if people could see how beautiful this is, everybody would love moths.”
The first Mothapalooza was held in 2013, with nearly 200 people traveling from all over the country to attend the event. This year, with similar attendee limitations, people have arrived from Nebraska and Maine. Mothapalooza is so popular that, some years, it has a waiting list. Even after more than a decade of success, Jim cannot believe it. “When we started this, we had no idea anyone would come,” he says. “We’re really just a bunch of people who never grew up.”
He taps the side of his giant UV flashlight and holds it out to me in official introduction. “This is the Beast,” he says.
The Beast, as it turns out, is a brand-name UV flashlight that’s a staple among moth-ers, and they tend to reference it by name. This Beast has its sights on an inchworm that’s hanging from a leaf above us. It is too high for Jim to reach, so we stand there, eyes skyward, watching the inchworm tugging its slower half behind.
Jim comes across as equal parts biology professor and frat partier. It is, I suppose, the unique mix that led to Mothapalooza’s natural-history party vibe. He’s an expert in the biodiversity of nightlife. When I explain that I’ve been trying to get to know darkness via the creatures that depend on it, he nods in solidarity. “I’ve come to appreciate night as a whole other world,” he says. “I’ve literally spent thousands of hours outdoors after dark. You get used to darkness. When you can name the sounds you hear, they’re not so scary. Moth-ing is best in the witching hours, midnight to four in the morning. Who can stay up? Even I can only do it sometimes. But doing it sometimes is all you really need to get an understanding of what’s going on out here.”
It was plants that first got Jim excited about nature. He has been a botanist for most of his career. At one point, he collected a glade mallow plant, which was rare in Ohio, his home state. He took a sample of the species to press dry so that it might be displayed in a natural history museum. In his office, during preparations, he found a caterpillar on it. “Up to that time, I’d seen a lot of caterpillars,” he says. “Usually, I’d just flick them into a trash can; I didn’t want them to mess up my nice, pressed plant, you see. But this time, something made me pause. I took that one to an entomologist friend, and he said, ‘I can’t identify this as a cat.’”
Many moths are hard to categorize in caterpillar form; it’s hard to tell what kind of moth they’ll become. Jim’s friend agreed to keep the caterpillar to see what might be revealed in time. “A while later,” Jim recalls, “I got a call from him, and he was like, ‘You’ll never believe it, but this morphed into a bagisara!’ It was only like the third one ever found in the state of Ohio. And it all started making sense: rare plant, rare caterpillar.” He realized then that he hadn’t been seeing caterpillars for the leaves. And neither could exist without the other. It was, for him, an awakening.
Kim Bailey, a first-time festival attendee, has sidled up to us in the dark, drawn in by the Beast and held by her curiosity about botany. She’s a milkweed farmer who, like me, has traveled here from the mountains of North Carolina, and she’s always had an interest in the way plants and butterflies collaborate.
Kim started her milkweed farm to support monarchs, who famously travel vast distances for their migration and depend on milkweed for their reproductive needs. In recent years, she has planted pawpaw plants for zebra swallowtail butterflies, black-and-white-striped creatures that depend on native plants that have lived in these mountains since mastodons roamed them.
If you see a pawpaw tree, it’s a clue that there are swallowtails nearby. Just as, if you plant milkweed in the monarch’s Appalachian flyway, you will likely have those winged visitors when they’re en route to and from Mexico. But even though she’s spent her adult life fostering plant-butterfly relationships, Kim’s introduction to moth-ing came unexpectedly.
Nocturnal pollinators weren’t even a distant thought when she planted night-blooming primrose flowers in her garden. Kim says, “I’d heard primrose bloomed at dusk, and I wanted to witness that.” So, she did, and because she was so focused on seeing that flower bloom in real time, she started visiting it, her schedule aligning with that of moths who’d come to visit. One of them was a hawk moth, otherwise known as a sphinx. It was as large as a hummingbird.
“I never knew something like that existed,” she said. “Every night, something new and more exciting came to those flowers.” For a woman who’d dedicated her entire life to flowers and butterflies, it was like a sudden doubling of what she loved most about the natural world.
“Day shift, night shift,” Jim says.
A few years ago, Jim partnered with an educator to write a book about moth gardens. It’s specific to native species in his part of Ohio, but it’s one of the first titles to ever focus on the connection between nocturnal bloomers and moths. Given the proliferation of titles about butterfly gardens, it seems to address a tremendous oversight. Because there are more than 12,000 moth species in North America—and roughly 800 butterfly species.
For all the talk I’ve heard about butterfly bushes, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone chatting about how to attract moths. A quick internet search will confirm that, mostly, when we talk about moths, we’re talking about the most effective ways to kill them. Even Kim, who has spent a lifetime cultivating plants for butterflies, has only just begun to pay attention to the winged workers who tend her land while she’s dreaming. But even when we don’t recognize moths as important, we still depend on them.
According to the USDA, approximately 80 percent of the world’s flowering plants require pollinators to reproduce, including three-quarters of agricultural crops. A 2021 study on nocturnal pollinators that was conducted by the University of Arkansas led researcher Stephen Robertson to call moths “unsung heroes of pollination,” indicating that, as an under-studied group, moths could potentially beat out butterflies and bees in pollinator importance globally. But just as we’re discovering how important moths are, they’re disappearing.
In 2021, the Guardian reported that the insect population, including nighttime pollinators, has declined in abundance by 75 percent in 50 years. For many people—including, thus far, me—those losses have been abstractions, because we haven’t known what we had to begin with. And even though moths still swirl after dusk in every state of the union and throughout diverse global regions, many people don’t know about their local moth populations or how light endangers them.
Studies have shown that artificial light impairs moths’ ability to pollinate by as much as 62 percent. Verdant landscapes depend on them, but moths’ alliance with darkness has given them a dull reputation. Understandings of moths seem to be limited to the idea of them as shadows beating against lights or marauders eating coats in closets.
But moths are beautiful far beyond their reputations. They have patterns of stained glass and textures resembling everything from cotton balls to feathers, often with butterfly-bright colors. There are more than 160,000 recorded moth species in the world, and new-to-science moths are found all the time, many representing plant species they coevolved with, their wing patterns serving as clues to what else lies in darkness. Some, like the cecropia, indicate the presence of cherry trees; others, jewelweed. They come with names like pistachio emerald, scribbler, and green marvel. They can be as small as dust specks and as large as baby songbirds.
Tonight, Jim, supreme moth partier, wants to help us absorb the magnitude of it all. Just uphill from where we’re standing is a station that he claims to be the most consistently awesome show at Mothapalooza. “We should go up there and see what cats we find along the way,” he suggests.
As we ascend, we’re joined by other people who’ve been drawn to our group by the Beast. Every budding moth-er seems curious about UV light being used as a cat-hunting device. Our group of three, then four, then five moth-ers soon grows to over half a dozen people. Jim is like a pied piper. Only instead of using a flute to put us in a trance, he’s drawing us in with UV beams.
The incline of the hill isn’t steep, but it might explain why the light station we’re headed to is of particular interest. Moths are known to demonstrate hill-topping behavior, a push for elevation. Apparently, hilltops are natural nightclubs of the insect world, where moths gravitate upward to increase their likelihood of encountering mates.
They use topographical clues to move upward until they reach summits. The ones who make it to the peak are thought to be considered particularly fit and attractive, rugged as rock climbers. Even slight inclines can encourage this behavior. To moths, even mole hills are mountains.
When Jim’s phone lights in his pocket to announce a call, he immediately shuts it off. “We don’t want to confuse the moths,” he says. “When moth-ing, you want to create a fixed point of light as a focus.” We all agree that too many lights would also distract us.
The overstory is dotted with caterpillars that shine white through the Beast’s purple haze. “Here’s a sycamore tufted,” Jim says, tugging the limb of a tree so that we can inspect the caterpillar closely. “They pretty much only eat sycamore leaves.”
Kim has a magnifying monocle around her neck. She lifts it to her eye to inspect the caterpillar’s spikes, which appear as spun glass. In the moment, both Kim and the caterpillar look like characters straight out of Alice in Wonderland. These caterpillars can be found falling out of sycamore trees all over New York City’s Central Park, where bands of moth-ers probe the city’s reservoir of darkness.
It would be easy to view those urban moth-ers as extreme risk takers. But, while it can unquestionably be a dangerous place, Central Park, statistically, reports some of the lowest crime rates of any police precinct in the city. Having more people around, like having more lights around, doesn’t always make things safer. When I share this bit of trivia with Jim, he shrugs and says, “The whole world is full of surprising realities once you’re alert to them.”
Many species of caterpillar—be they destined to become butterflies or moths—are nocturnal in their early life stages, hoping to protect themselves from birds. On a single summer day in Ohio, red-eyed vireos alone eat roughly 30 million of them. This is impressive when you consider that some caterpillars, like hickory horned devils—which, if they survive, become regal moths—can be the size of cocktail franks.
Jim seems to have vireo-level skills, noticing leaves with telltale holes in them from ten feet out. Often, these holes appear as damage, but when caterpillars have evolved with native plants, it’s a relationship that does no irreparable harm. There are exceptions—destructive exceptions, mostly tracing back to some non-native plant introduction and human interference—but, in general, holes in the leaf of a healthy native plant are a hieroglyphic script of how species have learned to coexist.
A garden with untouched leaves might be prized, but they are—from a caterpillar’s perspective—mausoleums of isolation, whereas native plants with chomps taken out of them are celebrations of interconnectivity. An imported plant that has no relationship to native insects might be completely intact, but its lack of holes means that it lacks a sense of belonging. Plants were meant to be touched, and nature is a collective art project that we’re all participating in—whether we like group assignments or not.
Without caterpillars turning plants into digestible protein, bird populations would perish. And without the specific plants they depend on, caterpillars would disappear. And without the moths the caterpillars become, plant pollination would be stunted. The connections are seemingly infinite—and complicated. When I’ve come across a caterpillar throughout my life, I’ve automatically thought I was seeing a future butterfly. But, given the vast outnumbering of moth species, as it turns out, I’ve almost always been looking at a moth-in-progress.
Jim seems pleased with the variety of life that’s clinging to the underside of the sanctuary’s leaves. “The sheer abundance of cats is pretty much what makes the world go round,” he says.
At the top of the hill, an arched doorway of light appears in a forest clearing. When we get closer, we see that it’s a piece of metal, bent and stretched with a sheet to form a canvas. The contraption is, on both sides, illuminated by a mercury vapor lightbulb sitting on a tripod.
Moths’ attraction to the moon is thought to be due to something called optical infinity: a constant light that’s far enough away, at a constant angle, to help sustain flight in a one-way direction. Artificial light is, to moths, confusing in part because it calls from a variety of angles. This sheet-stretched contraption solves the moths’ endless merry-go-round issues by providing a place for them to land. The creatures on this moth-ing sheet shot for the moon and ended up finding a human-built one, right here, on this Appalachian hill.
“Io,” someone shouts as a moth lands on the faux moon. The moth’s odd name—ode to a princess of Greek mythology—comes out like a strange battle yelp, “Eye-oh!”
The female io is primary yellow with what appear to be two blue eyes on her wings. “Well, hello there,” someone says to the moth in greeting. Then, to no one in particular, they ask, “Isn’t she beautiful?”
She is beautiful. And, though she has snake-eye patterns, she appears to be staring without menace. “Hey, another io! A fresh one! Over here!” shouts a voice from the other side of the sheet.
“Fresh? What does that mean?” asks a woman who has moths dotting her pants. Moths are landing on all of us, but her outfit—white as the moth-ing sheet—looks like a covered canvas. She’s already explained that, when she chose to wear white, she didn’t know it would have moon-goddess consequences.
“When a moth is fresh, that means it’s just emerged,” Jim explains.
By the sheet, a few feet from where we’re standing, someone notices a newborn regal moth and starts squealing. Regal moths look like royalty. They’re sometimes called walnut moths, so deep is their abiding connection to walnut trees. Regal and cecropia moths belong to the same family. It’s strangely comforting to see this regal moth’s fluff, orange and unruly.
Before I notice what’s happening, Jim has lifted the moth from the sheet. He holds the insect up to my arm for transfer. Her wings are immobile, but her legs seem to be strong. When she moves across the thin skin of my inner arm, I shriek. “You’re okay,” Jim says, voice steady. “Some cats can sting, but moths aren’t going to hurt you. You’re safe. You learn when you touch things.” Or, in this case, when they’re touching me.
I am not afraid, per se; I’m uncomfortable. Moth legs against my skin is a strange sensation. I feel exposed, vulnerable. Even though, consciously, I know it is the moth that’s endangered here. It’s strange how often humans feel like prey when we are, in fact, the predators wreaking havoc—often unwittingly.
This moth is exploring my inner arm as if it is an offshoot of the moon, but that doesn’t mean she’s here to be petted. I’m careful not to touch her wings. If I did, my fingertips would be coated in shimmering scales like eye shadow. This would not kill the creature, since moths are always naturally shedding scales, but it might cause premature aging.
The woman crouched beside me clearly knows her moths, and my shriek has caught her attention. As a preschool teacher, she is around children who are having new experiences pretty much every day. She says, “People are afraid of moths because they’re afraid of nature. A lot of my job is teaching people how to relate to things without bias.”
Not long ago, she helped an adult friend overcome a serious hesitation about moths. Even people who love butterflies can find moths intimidating. It took a few months, she says, but she introduced him to one moth species at a time, building up his immunity to fear. “When he saw how excited I was about moths, and how beautiful they can be, he started to change his mind about them.”
This is, at root, the premise of Mothapalooza. Apparently, it’s working. This hilltop station has drawn half a dozen giant silkworm moths at once. And more and more humans are scaling the hill to watch them frolic.
Gently, I put my arm against Kim’s arm, so that she might carry the regal moth for a minute, and I wander over to inspect a snowball-looking moth that’s landed. “A white flannel moth,” someone announces. The moth looks like a miniature stuffed animal with yellow antennae. “Look, from the front angle, this looks like a panda bear!” Jim says.
“Gah, I love this one!” the preschool teacher exclaims. “And white flannels aren’t even in my top ten favorites!” She stands back, waiting for me to take the lead in a human-moth interaction. But I keep my hands to myself. So she applies a little pressure: “Pretend you’re going to touch their nose and they’ll climb right on.” When I hesitate, she demonstrates by putting her index finger to the moth’s face.
I haven’t formulated a list of top ten favorites, but, as much as I love the panda now balanced on her index finger, I’m already distracted by a rosy maple moth that has landed on her fanny pack, with wings the pink and yellow of summer lemonade. This moth’s placement is notable since the creature has come to rest directly next to an enamel pin—a perfect artistic rendering of a rosy maple moth.
When I point out the pin’s living twin, the teacher laughs. “I’m wearing matchy-matchy moths!” The moth has likely mistaken the enamel version of itself for the fruit of a red maple tree, the rosy maple’s favorite species. It is those exotic-colored tree bits that this moth has evolved to mimic. In daylight, the moth needs to hide from songbirds, and it can, thanks to camouflage. Rosy maples look out of place everywhere, except for with the tree to which they belong. Among that tree’s fruit, the moths become invisible, even in full daylight. Next to this pin twin, the moth is trying to hide.
One of the only downsides to hanging out at the hilltop light station is the actual light, which looks like the flash component of an old-timey camera. When the light station attendant notices me wincing under its power, I mention that it seems worrisome to be calling moths with light—even though, unintentionally, we all do it, all the time.
He assures me that it’s something that he, too, considers every time he goes moth-ing. “If you kept doing this all the time, you might create issues for moths. But this is limited to two or three nights at most,” he says. “Even outside of this event, moth-ers are usually mindful of what they’re doing and how often they’re doing it. Using light like this is a way of training yourself to be aware of it.”
Mercury vapor are some of the most popular bulbs used for moth-ing, but different wavelengths of light seem to attract different species, something that’s not well understood in terms of physiology. And the apparent attraction varies with individual moths. The attendant points to a regal moth. “There are probably ten more of these nearby. They’re around, but they’re choosing not to fly over.”
It’s surprising to learn that moths, generally characterized as light-attracted zombies, might act on free will. Maybe it is not unlike how, to some humans, this scene is like something out of a horror movie they’d never want to see. And, to others, it is the epitome of beauty, something worth driving across five states to witness. This, too, is difficult to explain.
More than one of the seasoned moth-ers on site has seen people go from viewing moths negatively to positively in the span of a single evening. Rosy maples tend to be what Jim calls a “spark moth,” a creature fantastical enough to make someone who has randomly spotted it ask: If that sort of Dr. Seuss character exists in my yard, what else might be out there? At Mothapalooza, it’s hard not to ask this every other minute.
The later it gets, the more moths join us, until the hilltop is a cyclone of wings, every flutter a brush stroke against the moth-ing sheet. There are dozens of species intermingling, all with their own patterns, their own colors. Despite the living confetti falling against my arms and my legs, my attention is drawn upward, toward the tops of the tree line, where something is swooping. The animal is the size of a bat and the color of a star, wings twinkling in mercury vapor. Slowly, an imperial moth—another of the cecropia’s silken family—comes into focus, spinning through this midsummer sky before ultimately landing. Unbelievably, this moth is followed by another, similarly large imperial who comes in hyper, wings beating and beating.
“He’ll settle in a minute,” Jim assures us. “This light’s just too exciting.”
Other giant silkworm moths that have chosen to land outside the sheet’s perimeter have begun to tremble, their wings shuddering as if in fear. “The big ones have to warm up before they fly,” Jim says, reading their behavior as a signal that they might be attempting to leave. It inspires him to do the same, and given that he’s the one who led us here, we have an instinct to keep following him. Apparently, there are other moth stations of enticement. He clearly knows how to navigate this party. Still, we don’t leave immediately. Every minute, something unexpected flies out of nowhere, and, increasingly, it’s not intimidating; it’s exhilarating.
“I’m having a hard time leaving one light to go to the next light,” Kim says. I feel the same. How in the world, we wonder, could anything top what we’ve just seen?
When we finally catch up to Jim, he’s standing in front of a station that lacks the dreamscape quality of the hilltop light portal. It is just a bedsheet hung over the back of a Subaru hatchback. But the giant leopard moth that’s landed on it makes everyone ignore the station’s lack of refinement.
I’ve already seen almost one hundred species, but the giant leopard might be the most stunning. The moth’s stark white body is covered in thick black circles. Some appear hollow; others full of a blue-green iridescence.
“What color would you call that?” someone asks, marveling over its richness.
“Iridescent blue-ish?” a group member says, dreamily.
We’re in rural Ohio, communing with leopards. It’s preposterous. I’m swimming in awe even before the moth reveals an abdomen of black and brass, flashes of lapis blue and turquoise green that remind me of Egyptian jewelry, sacred scarabs.
We develop such fervor that Jim suggests we should give the moth a little space. It’s only then that many of us realize we’ve been fawning like fame-crazed teenagers. One by one, we move away, careful not to crush the moths who’ve landed on the station’s white sheet, which is running along the ground like the train of a bridal gown.
Throughout the evening, many leopards will reveal themselves here. There will be moths more diverse than we can imagine. But we, new to moth-ing, still don’t fully think of night as a place of abundance rather than scarcity. We’re acting like this is our only opportunity. We see this leopard as something peculiar, but part of its beauty lies in the fact that it is so very ordinary.
Giant leopards are partial to dandelions. Those are the plants that call to them, strong as a light source. And, despite the leopards’ seemingly uncommon beauty, like the weeds they depend on, they are not rare. Giant leopards can be found in Canada and Florida, from Minnesota to Texas. Every dandelion left to grow in a yard has the potential to bring these creatures closer; every dandelion killed in favor of grass pushes them away.
Jim has seen countless leopards. Unlike us, he understands that night is full of astounding creatures that will be pouring into this light island for hours. He shakes his head, amazed not by the appearance of this moth, but by our exaggerated reactions to it. “This would be like finding a cardinal for birders,” he says, citing one of the most common birds of the East Coast. “Giant leopards are everywhere.”
Around midnight, I visit a sheet that’s been hung on the side of a utility barn, where I run into a brother and sister who’ve traveled across the country to attend Mothapalooza. “I had a favorite moth species, then it changed. There are just too many amazing ones,” she says, eyeing a newly arrived red-and-gray moth.
“Scarlet lichen moth!” I blurt.
Jim overhears. “Man,” he says, “you’ve learned a lot tonight.”
It’s hard for me to remember a period of my adult life when I’ve absorbed more in such a short time. A few hours ago, I was unfamiliar with the lines of a scarlet lichen moth’s wings, but since being introduced to the species, I’ve helped more than four other attendees identify it. Now that I recognize its pattern, I cannot unsee it. And my field of vision is expanding with every winged arrival.
As the crowd thickens, so does the moth cloud that’s been collecting. There are so many moths, in fact, that some people are wearing masks so they will not ingest these airborne life-bearers. I keep my mouth closed, out of necessity. I take note as moth-ers make identifications. There’s a bold-feathered grass moth. A basswood leaf roller moth.
When the station attendant sees that I’ve started spending time with the tiny moths rather than hovering around the larger species, she walks over and says: “Silk moths are the bling of moths, but these micro moths, these are the ones I like best. Most people don’t pay attention to these little specks. But, if you really look, they’re like glitter.”
“Glitter sounds like bling,” I say.
She laughs. “I guess you’re right. Micro moths are just my bling of choice!”
Her commentary inspires me to lean in, side-mouth breathing so that I don’t inhale wings. From a distance, these moths might have appeared boring. But, dialed in, I can see that many of the small moths are golden. And I don’t mean yellow. I don’t mean the glint of plastic sequins. I mean the gilded gold of cathedrals and holy statues.
In Japan, Buddha statues have historically been gilded not to flaunt wealth but, rather, to catch the interplay of candlelight’s natural ebb and flow in windowless spaces. Sparkle is, after all, about how light submits to darkness—and darkness to light, in turn. These moths are crowns of gold, halos hovering above and encircling our heads like the famously metallic halos of Greek Orthodox paintings.
I’m so immersed I hardly notice that Mothapalooza’s roving golf cart has approached the station until Jim suggests that Kim and I, and a couple of the other moth-ers we’ve been walking around with, should climb aboard. He’s been keeping tabs on what’s going on elsewhere via walkie-talkies since the sanctuary is too remote for cell service. “The moth station I’m taking you to now is the hot new spot,” he says. “I heard they’ve got a couple of sphinx moths.”
Some people go club-hopping for fun in a city; some people get their kicks from witnessing the biodiversity of moths in Appalachian Ohio. If Mothapalooza is any indication, the latter attracts a surprisingly large crowd. I squeeze into the cart with Kim and her friend Sharon, all of us facing backward. When we take off, the light station fades behind us. The road is completely tree-lined. It’s like we’re traveling through a tunnel with light at the end. Only we’re being pulled into darkness.
It’s a strange sensation, watching light turn into a memory. When I point out the oddness to Sharon, she laughs. “You’re right. We’re not headed toward the light at the end of the tunnel. We’re going the wrong way!” But to reach whatever’s next, we’ll have to loosen our grip on what came before. It isn’t easy. This we’ve learned at Mothapalooza, over and over.
I wonder if it is akin to what a caterpillar feels when going through the alchemy of transformation, retreating from light into darkness for rearrangement. It’s a fleeting thought that soon gains resonance because, though there is no way for me to know in the moment, we’re on a journey toward actual metamorphosis.
Minutes later—away from the glare of the next party-hopping moth station—an unidentified caterpillar pupates on the side of an Arc of Appalachia guesthouse. One minute, the caterpillar is there. The next, he’s gone. Only he hasn’t vanished; the creature has just turned into something completely different. The moment marks both an end and a beginning.
Jim, previously unflappable in his boisterousness, turns solemn over watching the unidentified caterpillar shake as though preparing to explode before seemingly turning inside out. With surprising speed, the caterpillar transforms from a creeping crawler into a seed of dark mystery that Jim—even armed with the UV Beast—cannot inspect. “I’m a scientist,” he says. “But when you see something like that, it’s hard to call it anything other than magic.”
There are plenty of activities to enjoy in daylight hours at Mothapalooza as everyone waits for the prime attractions that can be found every evening, but I, for one, find myself too exhausted to join a guided hike or creek exploration after staying up late. So the next day, I spend time in the cool interior of the nature center, where I find a display that’s been set up by The Caterpillar Lab, an educational nonprofit that features live exhibits notable for using microscopes to project the world of caterpillars onto movie screens.
A crowd has gathered around the daily presentation. Seeking a little space, I wander over to a buffet in the cafeteria that’s lined with vases that hold not flowers but an assortment of tree branches. And on those branches there are armies of caterpillars.
I arrived in Ohio half-hoping to spot a cecropia in flight. But I’ve learned that it’s a little too late. Like fireflies, the cecropia species’ flight season is fleeting. Yet, here, I improbably have come face-to-face with a group of cecropia caterpillars.
The green cherubs are dotted with primary red and blue, and their feet are wrapped around twigs in gummy-bear hugs. I am so close to them, I can see their mouths churning leaves, tree energy that they will turn to silk, fantastical as spinning gold from straw. After nursing a moth that had no mouth—just like many, though not all moths—it’s inexplicably meaningful to watch these cecropia caterpillars eating. This is what goes into every moth’s making. This is a minuscule action that shapes vast landscapes.
My caterpillar-communing is interrupted by a boy, maybe four years old, who has come to stare alongside me. A Caterpillar Lab assistant comes up and tells the boy that the cecropia caterpillars, unlike some of the others, are okay to touch. Still, he hesitates, and his mother explains that he was recently stung by a hickory horned devil, so he is nervous.
Some cats are venomous, and some who are not venomous can still trigger our immune systems. Some people don’t react at all; some are very allergic. Like with any allergen, things are unpredictable and vary person to person. Reactions are dependent on personal chemistry.
“Do you want me to touch the caterpillar and let you know what that feels like?” I ask. He confirms with a nod.
The caterpillar’s body is surprisingly buoyant. Young and vibrant, this creature’s moth days are still ahead. The caterpillar’s setae, pale filaments, are prickly, but not unpleasant. I turn to the boy who is awaiting my report. “That felt like the bristles of a hairbrush,” I say.
The boy buries his face in his mother’s skirt, peeking every so often at the caterpillars. His mother inspects the branches and is pleased when it’s confirmed that they’re black cherry. “Oh, we have black cherry in our neighborhood,” she says, clapping. “We might have cecropia!”
There is, at the far end of the buffet, a collection of cecropia cocoons. With the blessing of Caterpillar Lab staff, I lift one and turn it in my hands. It feels both tender and tough, coarse silk protecting an inner layer of fine insulation.
Caterpillar silk was a key component of the earliest bulletproof vest, which saved its first human life in 1897. Today, researchers are working to use the material of silkworm caterpillars for medical bandages and ever-stronger bulletproof materials to protect humans from artillery of our own making.
This cocoon looks like the aftermath of a leaf’s death, but it is shrouding the cecropia’s most vibrant life stage, one that will arrive only after it endures the coming, colder season. The silken bag indents when I gently pinch to feel the pupa it’s carrying inside—a hard cylinder, shaped like a bullet. If I’d seen this on the ground, even ten minutes ago, I wouldn’t have recognized it as anything special.
The Caterpillar Lab’s founder, Sam Jaffe, has shaggy hair and a way of making even the most unattractive of caterpillars seem charismatic. The crowd around his microscope never dwindles enough for me to meet him, but I run into him later in the day when he’s on a break, browsing the edges of a parking lot with a red shopping basket. Small plastic vials roll around inside of it, clanking every time he leans down to inspect something.
When he sees me, he offers an unprovoked explanation: “The people who come here, I think of them as story seekers. So I’m out here finding some new stories to share.”
He’s on the hunt for leaf miners that he might later put under the Caterpillar Lab microscope. They’re tiny caterpillars who, in larval stages, eat the tissue of plants from the inside. “Moths have a lot going on. People coming to the station sheets at night forget that the stories they’re seeing are much bigger than that moment. Leaf miners spend weeks eating individual cells. Under a microscope, we can watch this happening. The story of these creatures extends beyond nighttime,” he says. “Every little spot on a moth-ing sheet has a magnificent life history. When you see a little dot, you’re witnessing an opportunity to ask questions: Where did this come from? What did it need? People obsess over moth species names, but we can’t really know what anything is if we don’t understand where it began.”
Gardeners are, as much as anyone, familiar with caterpillars, which I’ve heard some of them refer to as the bane of their existence. When Sam travels, he sells moth-loving bumper stickers. When I quote some of the ones I noticed in the nature center, he chuckles. “I Grow Tomatoes for the Hornworms—did you come up with that tagline?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “I know people who decide to plant extra tomatoes to take the caterpillars into account instead of getting mad and trying to fight them.” Humans often focus on what moths are consuming. But moths and plants do not have one-way conversations. Garden-moth relationships are complicated. Where there are moths to take, there are often moths to give.
At the mention of another bumper sticker—Moths Are Better—Sam falls into a full laugh. “All those bumper stickers are a little sassy,” he admits. “But butterflies get all the credit. Moths need people standing up for them. Butterflies are just a type of moth, really, scientifically speaking.”
The woolly bear is arguably the most famous caterpillar in the United States. When I bring up his I Brake for Woolly Bears sticker, Sam asks if I have heard about their weather-related folklore and the festivals thrown in honor of them, and it’s my turn to laugh. There are a few festivals in the United States dedicated to the species, but the largest takes place in the North Carolina mountains, one county away from my house. I’ve traveled to Ohio for a moth festival, thinking the concept was outlandish, when my own community throws an annual party for caterpillars. “Where I’m from, we call them woolly worms,” I say.
Woolly worms are found in Mexico, all over the United States, and into Canada. They’re one of the most identifiable caterpillars in North America. The weather predictions he’s referencing are based on the idea that the size of a caterpillar’s stripes indicate the harshness of an incoming winter. It’s Appalachian folklore I’ve known all my life: If you see woolly worms that are mostly milky brown, there’s a mild winter to come. If the caterpillar is mostly black, the winter will be hard.
More than forty years ago, a local entrepreneur—thinking of Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who famously predicts whether there will be more winter or an early spring by the status of his shadow—determined there was something of interest in these caterpillar stories, passed down for generations in the mountains. If economy-boosting tourists could get excited about a groundhog’s shadow, why not promote the fortune-telling stripes of a caterpillar’s back?
The resulting, circus-like Woolly Worm Festival was a resounding success. Each year, 20,000 people visit my home region to attend it, and roughly a thousand of them bring caterpillars to race up strings. There is always some variance in caterpillar stripes. So the fastest caterpillar is declared the official oracle of weather.
I have, like most people, thought of woolly worm predictions as quirky Americana fun. Many entomologists also laugh it off. But studies suggest that the length of a woolly worm’s brown-and-black segments are indicators of whether they got an early or late start the previous spring due to temperature change. So though they have not been proven to know what the future holds, their colors do scientifically correlate with the previous winter’s weather. History is by its very nature recorded backward. And woolly worms might not be prophets, but they are, apparently, climate archivists.
When I tell Sam about the excitement of people racing their woolly worms—cheering for an early summer or an extended ski season—he nods in understanding. He’s seen adults and children alike shout encouragement to a caterpillar pupating under his microscope, invested for reasons beyond their ability to articulate. Sometimes, people cry. The emotionality of it has inspired him to look for mythological stories related to moths. The dearth of findings has been disappointing.
“It’s surprising to me that more cultures don’t have moth mythology. Western cultures are especially lacking,” he says. “Imagine if you were a prehistoric human and you had a cecropia flying at you. I feel like that would be something you’d want to talk about. But maybe it’s just that nobody pays attention to moth stories.” Or, maybe, prior to electrification, moths and humans didn’t have as many close encounters.
Any conversation about moth mythology would be remiss without a mention of Mothman, so I ask Sam what he thinks of Appalachia’s famous cryptid creature, said to be half-moth, half-man. I have a feeling it isn’t the type of ancient story Sam has been seeking, but I’m not convinced it’s unrelated. As a New Englander, he’s unfamiliar with Mothman, but he finds the idea interesting.
“A moth that’s part human?” he says, trying to reconcile the concept.
I drove right by a highway sign for the Mothman Museum in West Virginia on my way to Mothapalooza just days ago, shaking my head at the chances of traveling up a mountain range to attend a moth festival and having my route take me right past Mothman’s hometown of Point Pleasant. I’ve always thought of Mothman as a quirky relative of Bigfoot. But the wonder dawning on Sam’s face makes Mothman’s story—which is familiar to me, strange to him—seem like Appalachian mythology with Greek gravitas.
As the story goes, in the 1960s, a large-winged creature was seen by some Point Pleasant grave diggers and, later, by a group of teenagers. Mothman was said to be a larger-than-human, black winged creature with red, glowing eyes, a monster that chased the teenagers from an abandoned World War II munitions area—an 8,000-acre property that, to this day, reputedly holds bunkers of unstable explosives.
People have hypothesized that Mothman has been, from the beginning, a misidentified sandhill crane or a large-bodied owl. Others say maybe it’s one of those animals, mutated from the toxicity of a nearby factory. Still more wonder if aliens landed, or if the government was testing covert flight equipment. Despite all the descriptions and theories, Mothman has never been reported as directly harming any witnesses. In fact, historic sightings often feature people questioning if what they’d encountered was a benevolent prophet or a bringer of destruction.
In the 1970s, The Mothman Prophecies, a book about the cryptid’s reported appearance just before a local bridge collapse that killed 46 residents, gained a global reputation. The book went on to be adapted into an early 2000s movie that sealed Mothman’s status as world-famous, with almost all related storylines examining whether he is a hero or villain. Today, up to 75,000 people from around the world visit Point Pleasant annually looking for Mothman. They come to visit the museum that’s dedicated to him, lining up by the dozens, even on Sunday mornings, filling the otherwise empty streets of Point Pleasant as they wait for the museum’s doors to open.
Mothman and Mothapalooza fans rarely cross paths—which is, maybe, why Sam has never heard of Mothman, despite being in the caterpillar business—but if they did, they’d find that they share a penchant for moth-loving memorabilia. The Mothman Museum sells magnets that say things like Fear the Dark in Point Pleasant under images of a hulking monster. Mothapalooza, too, offers souvenirs. One of its popular T-shirts reads Welcome to the Dark Side under the outline of a hand-drawn moth, delicate and lovely.
It’s a tale of two moth search-party invitations—one to explore the nocturnal biodiversity of moths, some still undescribed to science, the other an invitation to explore night’s doom-and-gloom reputation, as depicted in cryptozoology. Juxtaposed, they seem like an ink-blot test of how people view night. And their parallel, dark-centric slogans inspire me to ask Sam, “Do you think people’s fear of moths is related to a fear of darkness?”
In some ways, it seems that people think of butterflies in contrast to moths, like a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation, with night acting as a nefarious catalyst. Sam sets his grocery basket down. “You know,” he says, “I haven’t really thought about it before, but I don’t think people’s negative feelings about moths have as much to do with darkness as they do with light.”
I can imagine no T-shirt—in naturalist or cryptid circles—that reads Fear the Light. “What do you mean?” I ask.
“Well, most of the time, when people encounter a moth, they’re meeting a moth that’s disoriented by light. We don’t often meet moths on their own terms; we engage with them in chaotic situations we’ve created.”
Even now, after experiencing the overwhelming diversity of moth life in Southern Appalachia with moth enthusiasts, I’m not sure that I have ever encountered a moth in natural darkness. When I’ve seen moths, they’ve always been lured by something—a UV light, a flashlight, a porch sconce. The reality is that pretty much every moth I’ve ever seen, even here, at a festival celebrating them, has been in crisis, stressed by artificial light.
“People can’t handle the unpredictability of moths in disoriented states,” Sam says. It is patently unfair, thinking about this now, that we provoke moths and then blame them for acting erratically. Then again, it doesn’t seem all that different from what we, in the technological age, do to ourselves, as humans.
“Those moths, they just want to be doing their own thing in the dark,” Sam says. “In that state of artificial-light disorientation, it feels like a moth’s attacking us. But moths approaching us in artificial light just don’t know where to go, because we’ve put giant lights in their faces.”
Around us, leaves start softly clapping in the breeze. With new perspective, I imagine all of them full of tiny leaf miners, swinging from limbs, just going about their business. Lepidoptera are considered amazing because of the metamorphosis they go through to gain wings, but they are always in the process of shape-shifting landscapes. Forests and fields, yards and gardens—from the viewpoint of a caterpillar, they’re all like scenes from the interior of a gigantic lava lamp, shapes and colors shrinking and swelling as they chew their way to change.
We wade farther into weeds. With each step, grasshoppers pop up in greeting. Sam singles out a leaf that’s encasing a hungry caterpillar, and he puts it in his basket. In a few hours, he will showcase this leaf miner eating cells on stage, its micro-level work broadcast onto a movie screen in front of hundreds of people. This caterpillar, plucked from obscurity, will soon be a bona fide celebrity here, in Mothman country.
Leaf miners, as it turns out, are the caterpillars that go on to become micro moths, glitter bling. Some of the species I saw last night likely had their start not on a leaf, but in the darkened interior of one, writing scripture that can be seen—with my naked eye—on a plant’s exterior. “My job,” Sam says, “is to remind people that there’s always more to the story.”
A few days after I get home, I hear from Sharon, who has already collected black lights and ordered a mercury vapor bulb for her own backyard, located a few hours south of mine. She’s started inviting friends over to test the equipment at events she’s referring to as Moth Balls—fancy dress optional.
People might put mothballs in closets to deter the few species that feast on clothes. But moth-ing is full of bling more deserving of formal galas. “I’m addicted now,” she says. “I can’t wait to get back out there every night. There are surprises every time!”
I’ve already been scouting my own moth-ing equipment. I don’t have a mercury vapor bulb or a tripod, but I do have UV lights and a few high-power flashlights. A few days after I get home, I wrap a white sheet around my body like a toga and walk down to the river alone. The cotton grows heavy as it brushes wet grass, cool against my ankles.
The temperatures do not bode well for a good turnout. But I’m too curious to delay. There is, because of my time with the cecropia, a lingering sense of guilt in purposefully setting out lights, though I’m doing it to gain awareness of what my dark yard holds. In general, if darkness is not re-centered as a force that nurtures and harbors life, if we continue to talk about it as a deadened state, it’s doubtful that we will ever be able to shift the cultural conditioning that has led to a broad-spectrum lauding of light and the vilification of darkness. No one nurtures what they view as worthless.
I hang a piece of twine between two locust trees, hopeful that forests across the river are prime moth habitat. I am only now beginning to understand that light pollution is particularly noticeable to me because, in these mountains, darkness has not completely fallen to artificial light. I live in a frontier on the brink. It’s a part of the world that—like all relatively dark parts of the world—is in danger of being lost to light flooding. I am sensitive to the encroachment of light because I am watching it colonize the land I love most in real time. Yet here I am, with lights fixed on a fake-moon sheet, hanging UV flashlights from tree branches like ornaments on a Christmas tree.
I decide that I’ll give the lights an hour or two to attract moths before I turn them off. Part of any successful moth-ing expedition is knowing when to quit. Part of any responsible use of artificial light at night, maybe, comes down to that.
Insect species are declining globally, with implications rippling through Earth’s entire orchestra, creating a situation that the United Nations has identified as a food security crisis due to loss of pollinators. But studies have shown that even temporarily turning off lights during certain nocturnal periods, in cross-species compromises, can benefit some pollinators and migratory animals.
With moths, harm from artificial light doesn’t come from collisions as much as from an inability to pull themselves away from light once they’ve been drawn. Light also increases their exposure to predators, and dealing with the shock of reaching a moon they were never meant to touch probably gets exhausting. Studies haven’t definitively figured out how greatly artificial light is contributing to moth population declines, but there’s solid evidence that artificial light affects both moth behavior and physiology, influencing their reproduction, development, and individual fitness.
Adult moths are famous for being drawn to light, but artificial light also affects them as caterpillars. With extreme exposure, caterpillars fail to enter pupal stages. In other words, caterpillars get so distracted by artificial light that their bodies forget to complete their metamorphosis. They cannot heed the ancestral call of natural darkness, which is needed for their transformation. Artificial light, in essence, steals their wings.
In my yard, moth activity isn’t immediate. Still, it’s not a bad place to while away an evening. I can hear the river, happily gurgling. I can smell its silt, slightly sweet. I walk through a stand of pine trees as I wait, letting their needles brush against my skin like the bristles of a caterpillar’s back.
I circle back to the sheet every so often. Each time, I find more dots. There are bits of glitter. There are mayflies. Just as I’m about to give up on the arrival of any large-winged creatures, much less a giant leopard, I sense a fluttering.
A substantial moth has arrived, but the insect is moving too erratically for me to get a good look. The moth’s tawny form crashes into the bedsheet, wings hitting cotton like the skin of a drum. When the moth reaches the sheet’s edge, all movement begins to slow. Crashes turn to taps.
Sections of the moth’s wings are orange sherbet, lovely even before I can make out any distinct markings. In time, the moth is completely still. It’s as if this creature is waiting—frozen in some survival strategy.
This moth isn’t as showy as a cecropia, but there is a line of black circles along the insect’s abdomen. The middle dot is a perfect circle, but others seem to slightly bleed, making the moth appear to be tattooed with a moon-phase calendar.
I have an identification app loaded on my phone. In Ohio, surrounded by avid moth-ers who showed me not only how to access night, but also how to identify what I found in it, I didn’t need phone apps. But tonight, I snap a photo for positive identification. When I get the results, I’m stunned: I set out in search of a leopard. Instead, I found a tiger.
This is an Isabella tiger moth, to be exact. But the real kicker, the part that leaves me in open-mouth awe standing in the damp grass of my own backyard, is that the moon-tattooed moth that has accepted an invitation to my Moth Ball is none other than a grown-up woolly worm.
I’m embarrassed to admit that, before tonight, I did not know what the most famous caterpillar of Southern Appalachia—maybe even North America, at large—became in its mature form. I had never followed the woolly worm’s story past the fanfare of trademark festivals, since the larval form of this species, rather than the winged one, is what humans have chosen to laud.
Later, I will survey local friends to see if this is a personal oversight. Everyone I ask is familiar with the festival. But no one I know has ever really considered woolly worms past their famed caterpillar stage. Our neighbor is half-stranger. It’s equal parts appalling and wondrous. Because instead of making me fret over the unknowns of this world—like so many of the harrowing unknowns of recent years—it gives me reason to think of how marvelous it can be to discover them. And here, in the middle of my own life, when it might have seemed as though new experiences and epiphanies were an endangered species, I’m only beginning to recognize it.
The artificial light that’s drawn this moth is the same force that trapped my cecropia companion, leading to his ailments. The weaponization of light is a power I didn’t know I had, a power I’m still not sure I want to accept. But it is undeniable. Artificial light doesn’t just disrupt moths; it holds them hostage. To create a moth-ing station is like catching lightning bugs in a jar. Only here, light is the limitation.
Isabella tigers, like cecropias, live most of their lives in larval form. This winged beauty has only a brief window of life in flight. I have communed with woolly worms dating back to my earliest memories of the natural world. From the scraggly edges of my grandparents’ farm to the loose stone of my gravel road, these famed caterpillars have been crawling the land I know best and tracing the lines of my palms with intimacy for decades. Clearly, Isabella tigers have also been encircling me.
Every time I use artificial light at night, I’m part of a cross-species conversation. I call and call with headlights and flashlights and porch lights. But never have I paused to absorb moths’ responses, not really. The more I learn about the world at night, the larger I understand my ignorance to be; the more I understand that night has been trying to communicate and I have not been receptive to its messaging. This moth has delivered the end—or, rather, the beginning—of a story I’ve long been part of but have only recently begun to claim.
There are, thankfully, things I can offer moth species, including this one, in the long term—native trees, undisturbed leaf litter, soil that is free of pesticides. But right now, just as darkness was the only solace I could offer that cecropia in palliative care, darkness is all this moth needs to thrive for however long she has left.
I hunger for more citrine wings. I have a compulsion to burn energy to see what might come if I keep my lures lit. But when I lean in to inspect the tiger’s wings again, I flash to my cecropia companion’s wings lifting at the wisp of my breath. Now that I’m aware of this Isabella tiger moth’s existence, I need to facilitate a release. Natural night is not mine to colonize. It’s time for me, as a human, to return what I’ve taken without asking.
Even when darkness is restored here, it will take time for this dazed creature to reacclimate. It will take time for me, too, to reorientate. How often it is that when we attempt to tame and claim wilderness—be it in the form of a mountainside with fences or an expanse of night with artificial light—we end up entrapping ourselves.
This tiger and I have been drawn together by artificial light, the proverbial flame. It holds us both captivated. It holds us both captive. And if this goes on for too long, it will be to our shared detriment. But I’m the one who built this box of light, and I’m the one who must act to alter it. Beam by beam, I dismantle our cage until the tiger and I are both free to roam this wider, wilder night.