Her latest craze is the rosy maple moth that’s all decked out in cotton candy pink and feathery feelers. The wavy-lined emerald moth is another favorite-she adores their white squiggles streaking across soft green wings. She’s fallen in love with the giant leopard moth she observed at the start of the summer, its white wings adorned with eye-popping black splotches. She regularly spies moths so gorgeous they would “put butterflies to shame.” It’s hard to pinpoint a favorite, she says. Rhodes says that each night she’s stunned by the sheer diversity of the moths that drop in. Even fresh after a rain, Rhodes finds new visitors in her yard transformed-once, she caught a lesser maple spanworm moth in the act of sipping on raindrops.Ī lesser maple spanworm moth sips on fallen raindrops in the Catskill Mountains. “When it’s warm, it’s going to look like Grand Central Station on a busy day in New York City, just insanity,” she says. On hot summer nights, so many moths land on her sheet that she stays up until 4 a.m. When the night is colder, moth traffic isn’t so hectic, so she might head in early at 1 a.m. Rhodes says every mothing night is different. She adds, “mothing could be the new birding.” ![]() Mothing can be as simple as turning on the porchlight in your home and watching the moths it attracts. “It’s a perfect kind of pandemic activity,” Rhodes says. Instead, she found the ideal substitute activity: snapping pictures of moths, which are mostly nocturnal. On top of the lockdowns, she had a foot injury, so she couldn’t venture out on long daytime hikes and keep to her usual hobby of photographing birds. She picked up her passion for observing moths-known as “mothing”-last year at the height of the pandemic. Rhodes has been photographing these critters on most nights since May in advance of National Moth Week, which falls this week from July 17 to 25. Amongst them is this large waved sphinx moth that was photographed in Rhodes’s home in the Catskill Mountains. Soon, hundreds of moths will flock to the floodlit fabric like actors taking center stage, jostling for the limelight. Then she puts several blacklights above the sheet and waits. She wanders out onto her yard in Woodstock, New York, and hangs a white bedsheet across two poles or her porch. ![]() This general guideline goes hand in hand with # 2 on the list.When the night falls and most people start to turn in, wildlife conservation photographer Carla Rhodes grabs her camera and heads outside. Other diurnal moths are Ctenucha moths (pronounced Ten-oo-ka) and the beautiful, but unfortunately non-native, Alianthus Webworm Moth, Atteva aurea. ![]() Some exceptions are certain clear-winged sphinx moths (aka hawk moths) – like the Snowberry Clearwing Moth, Hemaris diffinis – that are diurnal. (1.) Butterflies are diurnal (fly during the day) and moths are nocturnal (active at night). There are some general distinguishing features for separating butterflies and moths, but as with most things, there are exceptions to every rule. Lepidoptera are holometabolous they have a complete lifecycle of egg, larva, pupa and adult. Lepido is Greek for scale and ptera is Greek for wing. Moth, in French is papillon de nuit, or “butterfly of night.”īutterflies and moths are both within the order Lepidoptera (the scale-winged insects). They are all just bugs, aren’t they? While native English speakers have two distinct words for the seemingly separate insects, The French, linguistically, consider them the same. Often one wonders what the difference is between butterflies and moths. Images available upon requestīy Colin Brammer, PhD, Coordinator of the Natural World Investigate Lab ![]() Butterflies and Moths: Differences Are Just Scale Deep
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