by Roger Deakin
As I rolled up the bivouac tent and my sleeping bag in the rookery, nine-year-old Luke came down the path through the wood to join me. We walked back up the hill to the house for breakfast along a woodland path white-lined by the splash of rook shit on nettle leaves. He asked me what was my favourite feather. I said the small blue wing feather of a jay. His was a sparrowhawk’s he had found in the wood.
The Moth Wood
The others were already there as I approached the shadow island of the grove in the dusk. Out in the meadow near the wood’s edge, in a little pool of pure white light, four men and a girl knelt in the grass around an outspread white sheet and a powerful mercury vapour lamp. In their intense concentration on the little arena inside the halo of light, there was the unmistakable air of theatre. Clearly, they were at their devotions before some blinding vision, some deity. Closer up, as my eyes adjusted to the brilliance, I perceived that the dazzling aura was filled with the fluttering of a dozen or more moths, most of them small, with insubstantial papery wings. I took my place in the circle quietly, and we introduced ourselves.
I had been invited back to the wood where I camped under the rookery at Little Horkesley to join a small party from the Essex Moth Group, including its chairman, Joe Firmin, for a night’s moth-hunting. My friend Trevor Thorogood was there with his daughter Kiri, whose keen naturalist’s eye was to impress us all that night. Joe is something of a legend in the moth world: an elder of the tribe who, in Essex parlance, tested positive for respect. His friends Ian and Philip constantly consulted him on the finer points of identification. Perhaps, in unconscious imitation of the moths, all three appeared vaguely camouflaged and sported the floppy cotton hats I associate with the jungle.
I should explain that moths are now generally hunted humanely: gone are the days when they were etherized upon a table or transfixed with pins. Instead, their names are entered in a kind of visitors’ book, and they are gently sent on their way.
Stacked around the foot of the stem of the mercury lamp was a jumble of egg boxes, forming a miniature cave system into whose shadows the moths crept once they had flown in towards the white light and circled it a few times. Moths are attracted to the blue end of the light spectrum just as bees and butterflies like buddleia and other blue plants. The ultraviolet blue light from the mercury lamp attracts but also dazzles the moths, so they seek out the shelter of the shadowy papier-mâché egg-tray hollows and come to rest.
Joe said nobody understands quite why moths are drawn to the light. Migrating moths seem to navigate by the moon and stars. There have been theories that the wings nearest the darkness beat faster, while those closest to the light react to it by slowing down, with the contradictory result that the moth slews off course and wheels in curving flight towards the light. But the truth is that nobody knows. Moths, in any case, live in a world of smells, as wild mammals do. It is smells that draw them to the female, or to the flower. They have eyes and can see, but sight is less important. They also have tympanal organs, sensitive to sound, situated on the thorax or abdomen. The moth ‘hears’ vibrations.
It was a warm night, and the lamp’s brightness had the effect of blackening the night around us. Moths were emerging in a steady stream from the wood, and, as they approached the trap, Joe, Ian or Philip could often identify them on the wing. We were all intent on them and alert for the slightest movement coming out of the darkness. It was like angling, and the total concentration on the fishing float: the way everything else just lifts away and you are left with a kind of meditation.
Over the summer, I had found myself growing more and more fascinated by the moths I encountered in woods, or flying in through my study window or door at night. Their names alone, as Joe and his colleagues added them to their growing list, were a kind of poetry: the willow beauty, the dingy footman, the clouded silver, the flame shoulder, the smoky angle shades, the dew moth. The moth we most desired that night was the white-spotted pinion, Cosmia diffinis. It emerges from the pupa from late July to mid September, and its larva feeds on elm leaves. Since Slough Grove is rich in resurrected elms, there was good reason to hope for the moth. A few days earlier the Essex Moth Group had set traps in the not-so-distant Chalkeney Wood and caught no fewer than eight white-spotted pinions, now scarce because of the effects of Dutch elm disease. If the white-spotted didn’t deign to appear, we would gladly have settled for the lesser-spotted pinion.
Neither moth showed up, but there was no lack of excitement to punctuate the calm of the evening. Every now and again an onlooker from the shadows would have seen our little circle erupt into activity. A net might be waved about in the darkness, or some innocent new winged visitor pounced upon and imprisoned for a short while in a small Perspex pillbox in which it could be minutely examined and identified. Positive ID often involved a good deal of discussion, and reference to two key books by the lamplight. ‘Let’s see what the Bible has to say about this,’ Joe would say as they all peered at a tricky specimen in the jar, or ‘Goater should settle this one for us.’ The sudden reference to Goater alerted me to take a closer look at one of the books, British Pyralid Moths. It was by Barry Goater, a teacher I hadn’t seen for years. The other was The Colour Identification Guide to the Moths of the British Isles by Bernard Skinner. ‘Barry Goater taught me botany at school, and most of the natural history I know,’ I said. The Essex Moth Group were visibly impressed.
Barry Goater was by far the greatest influence and inspiration to me in my passion for all things natural. People say everyone should be lucky enough to encounter a great teacher just once in their lives, and that is just what he was. To my shame, I had lost touch with him, but had been thinking that I must somehow make efforts to contact him, not least because I wanted to return to the New Forest. Who better as a companion than my original mentor, a native of the Forest himself? Joe promised to send me his address.
The first moth to fly in after I arrived was a sturdy little creature with dark-brown striated forewings. It settled on the sheet, quivering all over the way moths do, and Philip said ‘uncertain’. Joe wrote a note in his book, and I assumed they weren’t sure what it was, until they explained this actually was its name: the uncertain, a member of the Noctuidae, like its relation, the anomalous. I asked Joe which moth he dreamt of seeing one fine night, and he chose the alchymist, a woodland denizen that feeds on oak and elm. Only fifteen have ever been recorded in Britain, including a solitary Essex sighting down the road in Colchester on 9 June 1875. He also mentioned a butterfly, the elusive white letter hairstreak, whose food plant is elm. He kept hoping it would turn up where the trees are regenerating, as in woods like Slough Grove. Joe had a list of the two to three hundred species we might reasonably hope to encounter at this time of year in Essex. On an average night’s moth-hunting in the summer, he would expect to see as many as eighty or a hundred of them. But some of his hunting grounds were particularly rich. At Stour Wood on the Wrabness shore of the Stour Estuary, an old chestnut and oak wood, Joe said he and others had captured 260 species in a single night in June.
Just then there was a sudden flurry of arrivals: a common wainscot, several green carpets, a straw underwing, and two or three scorched carpets, which would most likely have been feeding as caterpillars on the spindle trees in the wood. The maple prominent that came in next would likewise have been feeding on the maple coppice. Kiri nimbly captured the moths, one at a time, in the little Perspex pillbox. Many moths are christened only in Latin, but the lovely vernacular names, Joe said, date from the seventeenth century: one species that flocked to our trap that night was the relatively common setaceous hebrew character, so named to denote the hieroglyphic on its forewing. ‘Setaceous’ is simply one of those specialist words used in the trade to mean ‘bristly’, just as ‘lunate’ means crescent-shaped and ‘ocellate’ means eye-like. The late, bearded lepidopterist Baron Charles de Worms was always known affectionately to his friends by the same name as the moth. As our nocturnal callers arrived, the lepidopterists
announced them like major-domos at a ball: ‘Large yellow underwing, iron prominent, lesser cream wave, brimstone moth, lime-speck pug.’
There is always rivalry between the various county moth groups. Ian told the story of a recent joint field meeting of the Essex and Suffolk moth societies on opposite banks of the River Stour, which forms the county boundary. A magnificent convolvulus hawk moth was spotted by the Suffolk lepidopterists gliding in downriver along their bank. At the last minute it changed its mind, crossed the water and, to a great cheer from the Essex party, landed on the sheet beneath their lamp.
We kept hoping for a hawk moth: privet and poplar hawk moths were both still flying, but none appeared. Some moths, once they have emerged from the pupa, will fly for as long as a month, but most live only a few days, or even a day, their brief lives dedicated to marriage and procreation. I reflected on the minutes ticking by as the moths languished in the shadowy honeycomb of the egg boxes: an hour of our time might be ten years of theirs. Death is never far away for them. No wonder the Greeks called moths by the same name as the soul: psyche. It is also the name of one of the most eminent journals of lepidoptery. One of the many aspects of moths and butterflies that fascinated Vladimir Nabokov, as famous for his entomology as his writing, was the ‘immemorial link’ between overcoming gravity and transcending death. The earthbound caterpillar coffins itself in the chrysalis where it lies all winter, apparently lifeless, then emerges into the heavens as a moth and flies into the night.
Bats, out hunting moths with deadlier intentions than ours, swerved about above the trees, swooping over us. Some species of moth can actually hear the radar squeak of the bat and instantly close their wings in flight, dropping to the ground like stones. Down on hands and knees admiring the subtlety of the moths that sat quivering in their beauty like nervous ballerinas, or marched and sprang about on impulse, unhinged by the sudden glare, I began to realize what a rich field of study they present: over 1,600 species of the larger British moths, and over 200 species of the smaller pyralids. Moths are the small print of natural history, something you come to in good time. They are essentially private beings, more mysterious than butterflies. I love the trustful way a moth will cling to my hand or walk about on it. A friend who used to spend her summers in a little whitewashed stone goat house in the Dordogne remembers how the moths and crickets used to enter it at night and arrange themselves about the wall ‘like brooches’. Details of the anatomy can be spectacular in their sculptural intricacy: the male drinker, a summer moth of woodland rides which at first looks like a teddy bear with a handlebar moustache, wears its antennae branched into delicate combs, like the cow-catchers on old American steam locomotives.
Moths are exquisite in their symmetry, all the more so because so many of them are miniatures, perfect in every detail and far finer than any human art. Seen under a microscope, the wing markings are composed of tiny scales, which appear as powder on your fingers if you try to grasp a moth by the wing. Often moths will lightly touch you as you sleep by an open window. Imprison one in your cupped hand, and you will feel its defiant energy as it struggles to escape. Moths wear the colours of lichens, of the bark of trees or of leaves, painting themselves to the point of invisibility. In The Unquiet Grave, Cyril Connolly wonders, ‘Why do soles and turbots borrow the colours and even the contours of the sea bottom? Out of self-protection? No, out of self-disgust.’ This can’t be true of moths, whose lives are predicated on desire. So intimate is the moth’s relationship with the tree, feeding on it as a caterpillar, living on it and hiding in it, that its coloration is a badge of loyalty. The pale-green small emerald melts unobtrusively into the leaves and flowers of the traveller’s joy it frequents on hedgerows and along the edge of woods. The september thorn could be an autumn leaf.
The stirrings of moth-passion I felt that night were in truth a reawakening: I have to confess to having been a boy lepidopterist of the old school. I was a raw hunter-gatherer, with a killing bottle and a setting board. From the age of nine or ten I never went anywhere without my butterfly net. It was no bamboo-and-curtainnet affair but a serious professional model with collapsible aluminium frame. At some point I hit on the bright idea of pinning my entire collection of moths and butterflies on my boarded bedroom ceiling. I could lie in bed and gaze up into the clouds of trophies. But the real living things knocked spots off my fading collection: the way the moths seemed to come up like bubbles at dusk as the colour drowned out of the flower beds in our back garden and the night-scented phlox or buddleia began to glow with pale wings. My mother was a great gardener, creating with her endless harmonies of flowers a giant, benign moth-trap and a butterfly Eden in which I flapped my net about like a lepidopteron myself. I have always thought of the moths and butterflies as a bonus to the flowers, as though Nature were admiring her own work. The royal visit of a hummingbird hawk moth passing from rose to rose heightens and makes memorable everything in the garden. It is entirely logical to pass from gardening or botanizing to a study of butterflies and moths. All caterpillars have close relationships with particular food plants, as every gardener knows. The wings of moths have the delicacy of petals, and their antennae are as slender as stamens. And in their mimicry of other insects, some moths are almost obsessive about the detail. Bee hawk moths have acquired transparent wings and, unlike the other hawk moths, fly by day alongside the bumblebees they pretend to be. The insect is both artist and trickster. ‘The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me,’ writes Vladimir Nabokov. ‘When a certain moth resembled a certain wasp in shape and colour, it also walked and moved its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike way.’ Nabokov observes how often the moth’s protective devices are ‘carried to a point of mimetic subtlety far in excess of the predator’s power of appreciation’. He sees in moth mimicry a form of magic, ‘a game of intricate enchantment and deception’, and concludes, ‘I discovered in nature the non-utilitarian delights that I sought in art.’
In the very first line of Lolita, ‘Lolita, light of my life’, Humbert Humbert mimics the moth in the intensity of its desire for the light. There is the symmetry of the moth’s wings in Humbert’s name, in the beginning and ending of the novel with the name of Lolita, and even in such playful details as the name of another character, Avis Byrd, avis meaning ‘bird’ in Latin. Such details are the stuff of Lolita, and of Nabokov the trickster. It was perhaps partly this love of detail that led him to lepidoptery in the first place, and would eventually result in his spending six years as semiofficial curator of Lepidoptera at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, often working fourteen hours a day.
Nabokov became as famous as a lepidopterist as he already was as a writer. ‘Few things have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration,’ he writes in his autobiography Speak, Memory. His mother and father shared and encouraged his interest, and he relates how he would return home late to their Russian country house after a successful moth-hunt shouting triumphantly about his catches to his father through the open lighted windows: ‘Catocala adultera!’ Nabokov was able to summon all his potency as a writer to express his refined, intimate appreciation of moths like no one else. He describes the handsome black larva of a hummingbird hawk moth as ‘resembling a diminutive cobra when it puffed out its ocellated front segments’. ‘My pleasures’, he writes, ‘are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.’ By the age of six he was already leafing avidly through his parents’ butterfly and moth books. Wandering the woods alone aged twelve, searching for moths, he longed to be the first to discover a species new to science and would allow his imagination to savour the reports: ‘… the only specimen known of Eupithecia petropolitanata was taken by a Russian schoolboy …’
Thirty years later Nabokov was to succeed. On 7 June 1941, en route by car from New York to Stanford, he found a butterfly he recognized as new and named it Neonympha dorothea in honour of the stud
ent who happened to be driving the author and his wife at the time. Again, in 1943, at the alpine lodge of his American publisher, James Laughlin, above Sandy, Utah, he captured a moth now known as Eupithecia nabokovi. Butterflies, moths, naturalists and lepidopterists not only wove through much of his literary work but inspired it. Nabokov was well aware of the absurdity of the public image of the lepidopterist wielding a butterfly net, but nobody has succeeded like him in evoking the ethereal magic of moths and butterflies.
A little snout moth paraded up and down before us on the sheet, skipping into flight now and then. The night was cooling, and dew was beginning to fall. A barn owl cried out in the wood and was answered by some muttering among the rooks. A clouded border fluttered in, then another moth with pale underwings and forewings shaded in tawny contours, two copies of the same map. ‘Isn’t this a dark spinach, Joe?’ asked Philip. Joe peered at it closely and pronounced that it was, only an unusually dark shade. All moths have a tendency to vary their shades, and the subtle gradations of the dark spinach illustrated in one of Joe’s colour reference books enchanted me in their sheer artistry. From a delicate pale green to dark, the species can vary from one place to another. Hot weather can trigger the minor mutations that control these colour changes. Melanism is sometimes the result, as in the famous case of the peppered moth, Biston betularia, whose melanistic form, the black peppered moth, evolved during the Industrial Revolution from the original white-with-dark-brown-peppering to the all-black form known, somewhat like the spaghetti dish, as carbonaria in the blackened industrial regions of northern England, where it still forms the total population. ‘Not a bad moth, the dark spinach,’ said Phil, half to himself, as he released the creature and it ran for cover in the labyrinths of the egg-box system. We sat quietly in our circle watching it like a movement on a Ouija board. After a while Ian seemed to come out of a reverie. ‘Not bad at all,’ he sighed. The dark spinach had made quite an impression. ‘We haven’t had another footman,’ said Philip. It was getting late. At 11.30 p.m. a green carpet landed on Kiri’s leg, followed by a spectacle, identified by Philip: ‘If we get two of these we’ll have what we call a pair of specs.’ ‘There’s a red twin-spot carpet floating about here somewhere,’ Ian remarked absently as he took up the net and hunted about on his own in the gloomy hinterland outside our halo. Joe was telling Trevor about Dewick’s plusia, a rare Essex speciality named after Bob Dewick of Bradwell-on-Sea, a member of the Essex Moth Group who maintains the world’s biggest moth-trap, built of brick, with a fan to suck the moths in. It is an immigrant, and only thirty-three specimens have ever been recorded in Britain. Kiri, meanwhile, had captured a light emerald in the pillbox, and we had been joined by a meadow grasshopper and a giant cranefly, the biggest of its tribe I have ever seen, with big patterned wings like clear church windows: the daddy of all daddy-long-legs. Joe pronounced the lesser cream wave, a late arrival, ‘a bit worn’ and computed that in the course of the evening we had been visited by forty-seven different species. It was nearly midnight, and the foxes were barking in the wood. We emptied the egg trays, tapping them to dislodge the moths clinging on inside and checking for any we might have missed. By now moths were all over us, in our hair, on our jackets, even walking all over their own pictures in the two Bibles lying open on the sheet. The lamp was dismantled and loaded with the nets into the back of a car I confidently identified as a Volvo Estate. Ian and Trevor gently shook out the sheet, and the last lingering moths fluttered off into the night. As our friends drove away, we caught a snippet of their conversation through the open window of the passing Volvo: ‘Not a bad moth, the dark spinach, not bad at all.’
