A surprising moth visitor
“Have no fear!”, cried I, the Mighty Macho Man, Sir Knight-Errant, always ready to rescue a lady in dire straits.
Advancing to the bathroom door, I opened it with trepidation, a rolled up copy of the ever-reliable Irish Examiner in my hand. Yes, there was indeed a monster in the bath, a moth the gigantic proportions of which we have rarely come across in this dangerous neck of the West Cork woods before.
It was not a Death’s Head — it did not have the visage of a grinning skull imprinted upon its carapace — but a Poplar Hawkmoth, fiercely flashing the red patches on its hindwings designed to keep the hungriest predators at bay.
Behind me, stood the damsel — actually no timid, trembling maid, but a woman who could probably see off a bear or a baboon were she to find one in her bedroom. Humanely, she had restrained an urge to clobber the thing with a towel or shower brush.
Besides respecting all life — even when she’d prefer not to offer it house space, as in the case of invasive slugs or millipedes — she also knew her husband would love to see it and to click his camera at it hoping to get that definitive shot-of-shots which he never succeeds in getting, whatever the species, the artefact or the vista.
A Poplar Hawkmoth, not popular with ladies of nervous disposition, or the faint-hearted of any sex. For one thing, it is unusually large for a European lepidopteron, five times the size of your average buff ermine, the creamy, furry-haired moth that most commonly flies through lighted windows. As large as the largest Red Admiral butterfly and with sombre colours, it is the kind of flying creature you would expect to encounter in the Amazon jungle but not on this temperate isle.
It is quite harmless, and eats the leaves of common trees, not only poplars. Nevertheless, it is less common in the countryside than in cities, where poplars are a popular tree. In city parks and boulevards, it abides, frightening the life out of townies when it zooms through their windows out of the night like a piece of wind-blown tree bark, and then proceeds to whizz about the room, knocking itself on the lamp shades, landing, perhaps, on a lady’s décolletage attracted by the reflection of light on her pale skin — or on her hair if she is a blonde — or, if the company includes a dandy sporting a well-polished pate, landing on that. What a commotion, as the gentlemen rise in defensive ranks waving their Irish Examiners at it!
The unfortunate creature is, of course, likely to be very much more scared than the human monsters that are shaking their august newspapers. Its arrival on their premises has been, for the moth, a huge mistake; normally, it is a creature of the crepuscular half-dark, or of the moonlit night, its habitat the out-of-doors, its roost the bark of a tree where its sober colours (it shows the red hind-wings only in an emergency, when alarmed) camouflage it entirely. So well is it disguised, that one might easily fail to see it from only centimetres away.
Its caterpillar devours not only the leaves of poplars but of sallow, willow and aspen trees. When fully fed, it makes a cell just beneath the soil, and there it transforms into a chrysalis. The first moths emerge in May or June from chrysalides which have overwintered. They lay eggs which become caterpillars, and these become a second generation of moths in July. This generation again lays eggs which, upon becoming mature caterpillars, bury themselves in September and survive the winter to transform into these beautiful, if sinister-looking winged creatures that fly in the following spring
I snapped the photos. First, I took the moth to the garden in a jam jar, making sure not to rub the dust off its wings.
When I lifted the lid, it crawled over my hand, and thence onto the ivy-grown trunk of a beech tree. There, I left it to roost. It is extraordinary, the rewards of leaving a lighted window open of a warm summer night in this leafy glen.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
