Tag Archives: natural lands trust

Blacklighting for moths at Hildacy Preserve

I’m finally getting around to posting photographs from National Moth Week (July 23-31). Over a period of perhaps three hours on July 30th I ended up with 27 moths, 3 caterpillars, 3 beetles, 2 flies, 1 cricket, 1 wasp, 1 mantisfly, 1 planthopper, and a mayfly. And, as I discovered the next morning, a bonus tick. If you want to view any of the below photographs larger, just click on them. And if you think I’ve misidentified any of them please let me know.

Here are the moths:

The moth larvae below didn’t show up to the blacklights, of course, but were loitering nearby so I captured them, too:

Below are the beetles that showed up. Stenolophus ochropezus was incredible common, with perhaps several dozen during the evening. In the future we really need to set out some sugar/beer bait to get more beetles to show up.

I have only two photographs of flies (a dance fly and a crane fly) but there were uncountable numbers of small dipterans at the lights. If I’d been thinking I would have set up my smaller lens to document them, but then I would have been there until 3 AM.

Below is the miscellaneous gallery featuring a mayfly, a wasp, a treehopper, a katydid, a green mantisfly, and a tick. The latter came home with me.

Here are all the iNaturalist observations at Hildacy Preserve that day. Currently that link just shows my photographs but hopefully others who attended that night will upload theirs, too.

Huge thanks to Mike Coll and Tanya Dapkey for organizing a fun evening.

For more details on National Moth Week, please see https://nationalmothweek.org/. For moth identification I recommend Peterson’s Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America, BugGuide (free!), iNaturalist (free!), and Moth Photographers Group (free!). For larvae I use David Wagner’s Caterpillars of Eastern North America.

If you live near Philadelphia, here are directions to Hildacy Preserve.

Hummingbird and snowberry clearwing moths

Here are some photographs of the hummingbird clearwing moth (Hemaris thysbe) and the snowberry clearwing moth (Hemaris diffinis). The first photograph shows Hemaris thysbe approaching wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) with its proboscis partially uncoiled, something you can’t see unless you freeze the motion with a fast shutter speed:

And here it is drinking nectar with just one leg grasping a flower for balance (it was a windy day):

And here’s the snowberry clearwing moth doing the same:

And here they are together, a pairing that took me days of work to capture:

Day-active, colorful moths are rare enough, but these take it to the next level in their uncanny mimicry of hummingbirds and bumblebees, respectively. The mimicry presumably protects them from being eaten by predators such as crab spiders, praying mantids, and birds. In addition to the obvious behavioral and morphological resemblance to hummingbirds and bumblebees, the moths also make a slight humming noise that completes the disguise. The noise could easily be an unavoidable consequence of hovering flight (approximately 30 beats/second), but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if their wings are rigged in some way to exaggerate the noise. I’d love to know the answer to that. My other burning question is why the hummingbird clearwing moth has clear wings at all … I would expect selection to favor individuals that did not lose scales, because such a mutant would more resemble a hummingbird, which has opaque wings. I’m guessing that reason is not because fully-scaled wings are too heavy — the hummingbird hawk moth (Macroglossum stellatarum) in the Old World has opaque wings and can manage 70-90 beats/second (wow). I wonder whether a fully scaled wing might damp the humming sound. All photographs were taken at Natural Lands Trust’s Hildacy Farm Preserve in Media, Pennsylvania. Oh, and happy National Moth Week.