Gardening for Moths: Why It’s Important for Backyard Conservation

Introduction and Welcome

Jim: And we wouldn’t have songbirds, for instance, if it weren’t for moths because the caterpillars are so important to the diets of songbirds and non-songbirds, like cuckoos. We would not have cuckoos for sure if we didn’t have moths, because that’s their primary food source.

Shannon: In today’s episode we’re talking with Jim McCormac. Jim has authored or co-authored several books including Gardening for Moths: A Regional Guide. He is also a photographer, and conservationist who worked for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources for 31 years.

Stick around to the end of our conversation to learn how to request the bonus content I created for this episode based on the tips Jim shares for how to easily observe and photograph moths at night.

Nature isn’t just “out there” in some pristine, far-off location. It’s all around us, including right outside our doors.

Hi, my name is Shannon Trimboli and I help busy homeowners in the eastern U.S. create thriving backyard ecosystems they can enjoy and be proud of.

Welcome to the Backyard Ecology podcast.

Hi, Jim. Welcome to the Backyard Ecology Podcast.

Jim: Hi Shannon. Thanks for having me.

Shannon: Oh, you’re welcome. I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation because moths are such interesting and often overlooked insects.

And you’ve written a book on gardening for moths, which I recently purchased and really enjoyed reading. So, I think this is going to be a really fun conversation here.

Jim: Good.

Shannon: But before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about what you do and how you got interested in moths?

Jim’s Journey into Moths

Jim: Yeah, I’ll tell you the moth story really quickly. I’ve been into, uh, birds were my gateway drug to biology and this goes back to six years old. So, I was essentially drawn to natural history as long as I can remember, and then that led to a career in botany.

Most of my professional career was with the ODNR, Department of Natural Resources in Ohio as a field botanist and then other things as well. But as a part of being a botanist, a professional one, we collect voucher specimens.

You know, I probably have 10,000 sheets, we call them, in various herbariums around the eastern United States, including Ohio State University where I went. But anyway, as a byproduct of collecting plant material in the wild, sometimes caterpillars come along for the ride.

I don’t feel bad about saying this now because I’ve atoned and mended my ways since then. But a lot of times when I get back to the office to flatten the specimen, which then gets dried under a powerful dryer to preserve color and that sort of thing, there’s caterpillars on it. So, I just flicked them into the round file, the trash can.

And anyway, one time I collected a species called glade mallow (Napaea dioica). It’s a really big stately mallow. Napaea dioica, rare plant. Rare, pretty much everywhere.

And there was a big green caterpillar on it. And this is going back over 20 years ago. And I just figured, you know, this thing’s eating a really rare plant, whatever moth it’s going to become is probably rare as well.

So, I took it to an entomologist friend of mine who raised this. He said, you can’t identify it as a caterpillar. So, he raises it, which is an arduous process, as you probably know. And he was lucky in that it wasn’t parasitized or anything like that and it matured into an adult.

It turned out to be a species that doesn’t to this day have a common name – Bagisara gulnare. A beautiful little old moth and this was the third record ever. I mean, anywhere, ever. The third one, it’s like no one knew anything about it.
So Eric, my friend, who raised it, was really excited and called me up, “You’ll never believe what this thing is.” It was the first Ohio record. And that did it for me, really did it for me.

So, I became really smitten with moths. That was a pivotal point for it and, you know, learned as much as I can about them since then. But it was good old Bagisara gulnare, which no one’s ever heard of that did it for me.

The Importance of Moths in the Ecosystem

Shannon: Wow. I can imagine. I mean, that would just be amazing to be able to find something that rare.

Jim: Yeah, well, you know, it’s just pure, I mean, talk about the blind pig finding an acorn, that would be “Exhibit A” right there. Because I had no idea, but what it did, is that it really made me intrigued by the chemical connectivity between larvae that eat plants and the plants themselves.

So, as you know, and maybe this should come later, but plants are producing all manner of compounds, chemicals, and it’s there to ward off herbivory. We’ve made many, many uses of that. As a matter of fact, we’d be probably a doomed species ourselves if none of that happened and we didn’t have these plants on earth to support us.

But, that just really intrigued me and it’s still one of the things I find most intriguing about lepidoptera, the moths especially is, this connection. This chemical connection, you know, between these certain plants with some being as specific as Bagisara gulnare, where it can only eat one species of plants.

That specialization tends to be the rule with moths not the exception. The exceptions are the polyphagus species, like a giant leopard moth, that can eat dandelions and tons of other species. That’s not the norm here.

So, it opens up a pathway to help educate people about the need for true conservation. Not just protecting ring neck pheasants or white-tailed deer or huntable things that are commercially valuable. The whole suite of things to protect all these other little critters that operate largely out of sight and out of mind but are every bit as important as a deer or a turkey.

Shannon: Yes, exactly.

And I mean, we often hear people talk about wanting to create pollinator gardens or butterfly gardens. And when they say “pollinator gardens” they’re usually thinking butterflies and bees, or at least that’s been my experience. But we don’t even think about the moths.

Which is one of the reasons why I was so excited about your book, because it does open up this whole other way to look at our gardens and the habitat that we’re trying to create around our homes. Because if we really want to create thriving ecosystems on our property, we need to be thinking more about moths because they play such a vital role in the ecosystem in so many different ways.

Jim: Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

The butterflies are young pipers, and just a piddling little pool of lepidoptera compared to the moths. You know, if we take my home state of Ohio where I’m sitting right now, there’s about 164 species of butterflies that have ever been recorded here. This is the rare stuff too, and even the vagrant that wander up once in a blue moon from the south or something like that, 164 species.

We have a woman, she’s profiled in the book, Diane Brooks, who is probably the most expert, prolific moth-er in the state of Ohio on her 12 and a half acre property in Perry County, Ohio, Southeast Ohio. She’s up to something like 15 or 1600 species of moths on that one property.

So, I mean, we have no idea how many moths are in Kentucky or Ohio. We just don’t know enough about them. But it absolutely dwarfs the pile of butterflies next to it, which diverged far later in the evolution of the lineage lepidoptera. You know, it started with moths and moths are way more specious. I never like to say more important relatively, because it’s just not fair to do that.

Shannon: Yeah.

Jim: But they’re doing a lot more heavy lifting, at least you could argue, than butterflies ever would. And we wouldn’t have songbirds, for instance, if it weren’t for moths because the caterpillars are so important to the diets of songbirds and non-songbirds, like cuckoos. We would not have cuckoos for sure if we didn’t have moths, because that’s their primary food source.

Shannon: Yes, exactly. In many ways, I would say moths are a keystone group of organisms, as much as the oaks or anything else that we think of often as the keystone groups of organisms, just because they do feed so much as caterpillars, as adults, and then their whole role in pollination that often gets overlooked as well.

Jim: Yeah.

Fascinating Moth Pollination Stories

Jim: You know, one of the thing, thanks for mentioning that because, yeah, of course they’re wonderful pollinators just in general.

Butterflies are rather smooth. That’s one of the differentiations people ask us all the time.

By the way, I should mention this now, I don’t want to forget it, because half of that book was Chelsea Gottfried, my co-author, who’s a wonderful entomologist and writer and photographer. It was a complete 50-50 thing. I approached her about the idea because I think someone needed to go to bat a little more seriously for these underdogs, the moths, but she was all over it. So, it was very much a mutual project.

But both of us give a lot of talks on this and people often ask, “How do you tell a moth from a butterfly?” Which is a really legitimate question. But in general, butterflies are smooth – their bodies. And moths are big, fuzzy bags. You know, it’s like an engineer probably would say “These should not be able to fly.” But they do fly and they’re just little balls of fuzz flying around.

When they land on a flower every pollen grains available sticks to them. Including in amazing ways. Sorry, I tend to go off the rails occasionally with stories…

Shannon: I love it.

Jim: We were doing a mothing event last year and there’s this young woman, she’s 18 now, but Nora Tempest. Nikki, her mother, and Nora were at this event. Nora’s incredibly sharp eyed.

She comes over to me and she goes, “Jim, Jim, look at this.” And it was this wonderful moth called a zebra conchylodes perched near the light. Looks like a zebra – black and white, wonderful thing. But she goes, “Look, there’s something wrong with its eyeball,” or something like that.

And I looked, and I knew exactly what it was. I’d been wanting to see this forever. I wish I could pull up a photo, because I have killer photos of this. But it was the pollinia of an orchid called cranefly orchid.

Only a very small group of moths pollinate cranefly orchids. The pollinia stick to the fuzzy eyeballs of the moth. The flower is an asymmetrical bell basically. So it forces the moth’s fuzzy eyeballs into contact with the pollen sack. Pollinia is the orchid speak for it. And it sticks to the fuzzy eyeball of the moth.

And then when the moth pulls away, it pops off. And when the moth goes to another cranefly orchid, then it, you know, it bursts on that plant. And the astigmatic processes of the orchid uptake the pollen and pollinate it. So, moth pollination of orchids by fuzzy moth eyeball. That’s getting pretty explicit.

Shannon: That is, and I mean, I always knew that, or not always, but I’ve known for a long time that our native orchids were often pollinated by moths. And we’ve got cranefly orchids all over our farm because we’ve got part woods and part fields and they’re all in our woods.

But I didn’t realize until I was reading your book that the pollen is getting transferred on the eyeball. I mean, I know some butterflies transfer pollen like that, but I didn’t realize that that was what was going on with the cranefly orchids. I thought that was so cool.

Jim: Oh, if I were you, I’d stake out some of those plants in July and try and get pictures of the moths going to it. That’s my next step too. But now I have the pollen on the eyeball of the moth, but I haven’t seen the actual process occur.

But, you’re lucky to have that orchid. It’s a really cool plant, but all orchids are neat.

But, you’re exactly right. Moths are doing the heavy lifting totally here. As a matter of fact, here’s one more quick story about a rare orchid.

In Ohio, we have about five sites for the federally threatened eastern prairie fringed orchid. It’s one of the rarest of the rare, you know, federally threatened. And I got permission to go to a site one night where it was in peak bloom and sit out there in the dark hoping to get the sphynx moth coming to it.

So, these big Platanthera orchids, the big ones, like purple fringeless orchids, these sort of things, have long nectar spurs tubes that come off the base of the flower. They’re really, really long, like we’re talking two inches maybe. And the nectar reward is in the base of that.

So, the only thing that can get it, and it’s preselected evolved to pre-select sphynx moths basically, is these sphynx moths that can hover because there’s no landing pads. They have to hover in front of the flower and then have a proboscis long enough to plum the depths of that nectar spur. So, there was little data on which sphynx moths are pollinating this federally threatened orchid.

Anyway, I sit out there. And then all of a sudden it’s getting pretty dark. I think I’m on a fool’s errand here, and I’m getting eaten up by mosquitoes. And all of a sudden this wraith just comes out of the dark. A big sphynx moth comes right to my orchid that I’d staked out and went around plumed every flower.

You know the moth too. Everyone does who grows tomato plants. The tobacco hornworm or tomato hornworm, it’s incorrectly called, that eats people’s tomato plants. And many, many of those have been killed in the name of preserving non-native tomato plants. But that’s a native moth, the Carolina sphynx as it’s called as an adult. And that’s what was pollinating this federally threatened orchid.

So, people who have tomato plants, and I like tomatoes as much as the next person, but sacrifice a few to the hornworms if they come. If you are so lucky as to get those on your tomato crop, and let them have some, because they become a wonderful native component of our lepidopteran.

Shannon: Yes. And I often wondered what they became and what they pollinated. I mean, I knew they were a native species. I just wasn’t sure how they fit in other than, as a food source for the parasitoid wasps that are always parasitizing them.

And for some reason I just never actually got curious enough to look it up. And I don’t know why, because I’m always curious about all those things. But for some reason that one never hit me. So, thanks for sharing that.

Jim: Oh sure. And I’ve got a blog, if someone just googles my name, they’ll probably go right to the blog. And that whole story with pictures is on there somewhere and it’s easily searchable so that people could see that moth at that orchid if they wanted to see it. So anyway, though, even the lowly, uh, unloved moths, especially unloved moths like that one, they’re serving important purposes.

You mentioned the parasitoids. That’s a horrific yet fascinating component of all these. It’s incredibly common. We don’t know how lucky we’ve got it as Homo sapiens, you know.

Because how would you like to be stung by a little wasp, then those larvae start growing inside of you and eating your soft parts until you’re left as just a barely living husk and they burst out of the human shell that you now are?

This would not be fun, but it is so common in that world. But then those go on to feed other things. Those wasps are eaten by many other things and it’s just a cascading food web. Horrific as it may be.

Shannon: Oh, yes. And yeah, and it’s not just the ones that we always see the cocoons sticking out of them too. I have a friend who shared with me a picture of a saddleback caterpillar that had the cocoons on the outside, but then when you zoomed in and looked at it, there were others coming out of like just the skin itself.

So, you had the ones that formed the cocoons on the outside, and there were other species that were forming cocoons on the inside as well. And those were emerging. Oh, it was just… that picture gave me creeps for nights. But it was so fascinating too.

Jim: Yeah, it is fascinating. We don’t even know the half of it. You know, all these parasitoids on parasitoid layers and the whole thing. You know, Charles Darwin wrote a famous letter to Asa Gray.

If I went over to my shelf, I could show you Gray’s Manual of Botany. But Asa Gray was one of the leading scientists of the time and a mentor of sorts to Charles Darwin.

And he wrote a famous letter to Darwin after he discovered the existence of these parasitoids and asked what kind of kind and benevolent God would create such a thing as this. And I don’t know that Gray had much of an answer for him.

Moth Beauty and Diversity

Shannon: And I mean, we’ve mentioned it already, even though we often think of moths and dismiss them as just those little brown, gray flappy thingies on the screen or by the lights, they are so diverse and so beautiful, so many of them. They’re not all just that brown gray coloration. There’s some absolutely gorgeous ones. And ones that are diurnal (flying during the day), as well as those nocturnal nighttime flying ones that we always think of as moths.

Jim: Yeah. Oh yeah. They’re a photographer’s dream. I’m a long time photographer of virtually every subject. I do it all. But the moths are a Wild West. You’re getting material that very few other people will have. It’s not hard to do.

And then, one thing we’ve learned, those of us that take pictures of them a lot, is you have to look at them from every angle. Because sometimes there’s pseudo faces on the butt. If you look at them from behind, they look cooler than they do from the front.

So, the well won’t run dry, you know, if you’re into photographing subjects that are really interesting and that not everyone has like bald eagles and sandhill cranes and things like that. And then, like you mentioned, the diurnal ones…

A big gateway moth to interest people that I’ve found, maybe the biggest group, are the hummingbird moths, the clearwing moths. And there’s two species in our part of the world. But because they’re out during the day and they’re so easy to see.

Usually people think they’re miniature hummingbirds. They’re like, “I saw this dinky little hummingbird.” And they are introduced to the world of clearwing moths, diurnal moths, that act just like hummingbirds – convergent evolution. It’s really interesting.

Shannon: Oh yeah, it is. I’m like a lot of people. I love the little clearwing moths, the hummingbird or bumblebee moths. I mean, they’re just absolutely gorgeous and so cute.

Jim: And so are the caterpillars too. They’re just delights. Like, they could win larval beauty pageants. These things are really exquisite and easy to grow. I’m looking right outside my front window and there’s the native honey honeysuckle bush, Diervilla lonicera, that hosts both of them. Both species of those clearwings will eat that. And I have them here in the yard.

And then just left of that is a coralberry, which is also in the honeysuckle family. And both species will eat that and that’s why I have them because I have their host plants here.

Shannon: We’ve got a bunch of coralberry in the woods as well. So, I found one of the caterpillars on it one time. And like you said, they’re so cute. They’re just little dainty, cute things.

Jim: Yep. That’s a great moth and an easy one to see. You don’t have to be out at three in the morning and to see one of those, like some of this other stuff.

Something popped in my mind I thought I should mention. We’re talking about moths and nocturnal versus diurnal. Well, nocturnal is of course much better if you want to see blizzards of moths.

Mothapalooza

Jim: And, this coming weekend is the famous Mothapalooza, which is an event here in Ohio. People might want to look it up. I should have given you the link for that. I forgot, sorry.

But Mothapalooza, if you just Google it, you’ll go right to the website and that’s about 150 moth enthusiasts coming together for late night mothing for two nights over the weekend.

Beautiful part of Ohio. It’s run by the Arc of Appalachia Conservation Land Trust Group. And if you want to be around like-minded people, that’s the place to do it. Um, too late this year, but next year it’ll be about this time of year.

Shannon: Okay, and I will put a link in the show notes to the Mothapalooza website so that people can easily find it and make plans for possibly next year because that does sound like it would be fun.

Jim: Oh yeah, it’s great. And the Caterpillar Lab is there. You’ve got to see that. Sam Jaffe, they’re in New Hampshire, but Sam comes down for that every year. And there is no one that’s done more to interest people in caterpillars than Sam Jaffe, who’s just like a Pied Piper for the larval crowd, other than Dave Wagner, who literally wrote the book, the Caterpillars of Eastern North America. But so, it’s a real treat to see all the cool caterpillars that Sam will have with him that people can see.

Gardening for Moths

Favorite Native Plants for Moths

Shannon: So, what are some of your favorite native plants for attracting moths?

Jim: There’s a lot of them. I’m a big advocate of native honeysuckles. That’s a very small group for us. Now, honeysuckles are tarred these days by all the non-natives, the bush honeysuckles, especially of at least three or four species that are invasive. But, there’s some really, really attractive natives that are easily found in the landscape trade.

And, I really like those, partly because I really like the hummingbird clearwing moths. But, as we all know, or most of us know from Doug Tallamy’s work, oaks are the biggest bang for the buck.

So, you could argue that every yard should have at least one white or red oak in it. Just the straight white oak or red oak. We don’t have to get fancy with blackjack oaks or post oaks or anything like that. That’s going to really increase the population.

Maples are wonderful. You know, if we’re talking trees now, because most yards like to have some trees. And the favorite maple for me by far is the sugar maple. Good old sugar maple. The vibrant colors in fall are worth it alone. But there are probably, in our neck of the woods, something along the lines of, I don’t know, several hundred species of moths, about half of that of an oak, maybe that would use a sugar maple, including things like the rosy maple moth.

Shannon: I love that one.

Jim: There’s one for people. This is like a flying teletubby. I mean, it looks like a pink and yellow teletubby. It’s a total gateway moth. I know for a fact, a number of people who became interested in moths because they went out, looked under their nightlight, and there’s this pink and yellow moth, a rosy maple, moth sitting there. And it’s like, “What in the world is this thing?”

And then they want to know more and they get into moths. But it came off their red maple or sugar maple. So, maples are good.

Herbaceous plants. There’s so many options. I would say the aster family in general. That’s the biggest family of plants in the world. So, there’s a lot of subject fodder there. But just good old, you know, gray headed cone flower. If you’re bold enough, prairie dock, which you might have to stake up. But, uh, blazing stars. All these sorts of things. Most of them have specialists.

Wingstem. You know wingstem? So, this becomes a bit weedy in my yard, and I have to reign it in, but I love it. Wingstem and its close allies in that genus Verbesina. Those are wonderful plants that have their own specialist moths on it, and a specialist butterfly the silvery checker spot that’s tied to those.

And they’re easy to grow. I mean, even a brown thumb like me can grow these things and I usually have to reign them in eventually. So, the aster family’s a really heavy hitter source for them. And on it goes.

I think we profile over 150 species of plants directly in the book, often mentioning other ones within that family or genus too. So, the actual number’s probably a lot higher than that. And we chose those typically because they are the heavy lifters in the plant world. They’re producing more moths than most of them do.

Shannon: Yeah. There are so many that do attract so many beautiful moths and interesting moths as well.

Jim: And then, if you’re really lucky, you know, walnut is good. A lot of people don’t like them because they’re messy – the big fruit falling. But I’ve got a big walnut in the backyard and one of the holy grails of the moth world comes off that.

As a caterpillar it’s called a hickory horn devil. You, you obviously know about it. And it’s called a, um, what is it? The royal walnut moth, I think, if I’m remembering the common name.

Shannon: Yeah.

Jim: But the coolest part of it is this caterpillar. Alright, so this thing…

You know, caterpillars, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but if someone doesn’t know, they grow through stages. They’re usually living as a caterpillar longer than any other active part of their life cycle. They might last longer as a cocoon if they’re over wintering that way. But the caterpillar generally lasts a lot longer than the moth it becomes.

And they grow through often five instars or stages, like the hickory horn devil. By the time this thing hits the fifth stage, it’s the size of a hot dog. All right? You can literally hear one crunching the foliage from five feet away. The crunching sound it makes. And if someone doesn’t believe this, I have a picture of one in a hotdog bun so you can see it. It’s on my blog, I’m sure.

But we’re out and we saw one of those. And anyway, we’re in the middle of nowhere and I talked a friend of mine, Jeff White. I said, “Jeff, man, I’ll give you like five bucks, 10 bucks, or whatever, if you run into town,” because that town wasn’t very near, “And get me a bag of hotdog buns.”

He did. And so we put him in the hot dog bun. Didn’t hurt him, put him back on the tree when we were done. So, I have this picture showing they’re every bit as big as a hot dog.

Well, that’s a big bag of goo. They don’t eat just walnuts, but walnut’s a favorite plant. I found more of them on that than I have hickory. And hickories, by the way, are really good as well. That would be another good yard tree to have.

But the, the general idea here is certainly don’t plant something like a Bradford pear or a calorie pear or Norway maples or these sorts of things. Stick to the natives.

If you want to be different, something like a pitch pine. So, we have a half a dozen or so native pines in the genus Pinus. Pitch pine to me is the most stately. They look like big bonsais, you know, really a beautiful plant. A little tricky to grow sometimes. White pine’s the easiest. But those pines have their own suite of specialists that are really fascinating. Many of the caterpillars mimic pine needles to perfection and good luck finding them. But they’re there and they’ll produce their own really cool suite of moths.

Shannon: So no matter what type of yard you have, and what kind of landscaping you want to do around your yard, there are wonderful plants that could do really well at attracting moths and supporting them.

Jim: Yes. And if someone is really bold….

Um, this is like a little known thing and a trivia question botanically, but what is the biggest genus of plants in this part of the world? Most people probably wouldn’t get it, but it’s Carex. This is the major genus of sedges.

We have 185 species of Carex in Ohio. There’s no other genus of plants that comes close to that. And they have their own cast of caterpillars from moths that eat those.

So, spicing the yard with a little sedges, maybe even replacing some lawn with sedges that look like lawn. The back half of my backyard’s all sedges now. I’ve vanquished the turf grass.

And as a byproduct, if someone does this, sorry to get off the moths, but you’ll have lightning bugs, more lightning bugs. Because as they’re at larval stage, they’re glowworms down in the ground and they don’t do well in non-native turf grass. They do really, really well in sedge grass like I’ve got.

So, I have my own private lightning bug, firefly show here this time of year where I notice my neighbors are largely void of fireflies flying around. But, it’s because of the sedges back there.

Shannon: I hadn’t made the connection with the sedges, but yeah, I mean, anytime you get more native plants and have vegetation that’s not two inches tall and that taller vegetation, you’re going to start getting more and more fireflies and lightning bugs.

And a lot of people have sedges growing naturally that they don’t even think about, especially if you don’t have the newly installed perfect yard. I mean, if you’re the type of person that whatever grows and is green and can be mowed is your yard and is your “grass” we’ll say, there’s a good chance, at least around where I’m at, that you’ve got sedges you don’t even realize that you’ve got.

Once I started actually looking and paying attention, I was surprised at just how many people’s yards I found them in. And my mother, she has a whole section, one whole side of her yard, is all Carex and sedges and she didn’t plant them there, they just came in naturally.

We’re more in a wilder area, more in the country, than she is. So, we’ve got sedges scattered throughout our yard too. And I mean, I love them. When they come up where I’m putting a garden bed in or something, I just leave them there. They’re great.

Jim: Yeah, that’s a really, really good point. I’m glad you brought that up because I should mention I’m not in a particularly wild area, Worthington, Ohio. It’s suburbia. But the dominant sedge in my backyard showed up on its own. It may have come in on my feet.

If someone’s really interested in this, this is a good starter sedge. The charming sedge is a common name for it, but it’s Carex blanda, like George Blanda, the football player, B-L-A-N-D-A. And it is so easy to grow.

All I did when I noticed it, I just quit mowing the yard as much. I just skipped every other mowing for that back part of the yard. And that’s all it took. And it took off. And I’d say from the point it got enough where I noticed it to almost covering that whole part of the yard’s only been two to three years and it was just the mowing regime that I think allowed it to flourish.

Then it doesn’t even get that tall, like it might get a little taller than most people would want, but you just mow it back. But you only have to mow about half as often, which is good too for the environment and then good for the critters and the fireflies and then you have native turf.

I hope this becomes a bigger thing too. I don’t think that’s really known like it should be that it’s fairly easy to transform this turf grass to native sedges that will, even if mowed regularly, will still produce a lot more wildlife than non-native bluegrasses ever would.

Shannon: Yeah, Mount Cuba’s work I think has really helped to get that started with people recognizing that from their Carex sedge trial that they did a couple of years ago,

Jim: Oh good. Yeah, they seem to be on the front lines of a lot of this stuff.

Observing Moths

Shannon: So, what are some of the best ways to go out and look for these moths and observe these moths? Besides, like, taking our flashlight out and just looking at the flowers.

Jim: All right, so sometimes people ask me what my favorite moth is, and it’s usually the same. Here would be a way for the really adventurous moth-er to see a cool moth, and one that is just cherished by people who know moths.

There is a species called the sooty-winged chalcoela. I think we did an inset box or something in the book on it, but the sooty-winged chalcoela just has to be seen to be believed. It’s really cool. It can be in very urban air environments or in the country. Doesn’t matter.

What it does… this is karmic payback. All right? Because, we all know the little paper wasps, they’re in the genus Polistes. They build those little papery nests under your eaves that hang down on a stem and the wasps guard those, the female wasps. Of course, male was can’t sting. But the females guard these and I’ve been stung by them. It hurts.

So, the sooty-winged chalcoela female sneaks in there at night and lays eggs near the base of that nest. She doesn’t stick them in. When the little caterpillars hatch, they climb up and enter the cells of the wasp nest being diligently guarded by these females and they prey on the wasp grub larvae within the cells.

Those wasps, just as a curious footnote, prey heavily on caterpillars. The Polistes, those paper wasps are predators that go after other living insects and caterpillars are high on their list to get. So, this is karmic payback. Now, we have this moth going and eating them as larvae.

The rub with this is you’ve got to go up by the nest. I wanted those caterpillar pictures so bad and then I’m like, “You know, if I go up there, I’m going to get stung, like bad.” And so anyway, I did it the cowardly way.

There was a woman, a friend of mine, who sent me a picture of a sooty-winged chalcoela on her eaves. She goes, “This is cool. Some kind of moth. What is this thing?”

Well, there was the paper wasp nest right next to it. And I said, “If you don’t mind, when those wasps die off, when it gets cold take that nest and put it in a jar or something. I want to see it.” She did and we dissected it and there were the caterpillars of the chalcoela moth inside of it.

So anyway, go look for really cool little moths that are orange and gray sitting around paper wasp nests. You run the risk of a sting possibly, but it’d be worth it to see the sooty-winged chalcoela, one of the coolest moths we’ve got.

Shannon: That is amazing because you don’t… caterpillars are supposed to eat plants. They’re not supposed to eat wasps or wasp larvae.

Jim: They’re not the only one, but it’s vanishingly rare. I would also note there’s a butterfly that does the same thing, the harvester. Really, cool butterfly. But, its caterpillars prey on aphids. If you’ve ever seen those little wiggling, white fuzzy aphids on alder trees or others, beach, things like that, they feed on those. But there are more moths that are carnivorous, you know, at least as caterpillars, but not very many. But that’s the coolest one I know about.

Shannon: Yes. That is really, really cool.

Jim: But I’m sorry. I think you were asking me, how do we easily see moths. And I went off on that because that’s not the easiest one to see.

You know what I do here in the yard if I want to add to my moth list, I put a light on my white shed wall. I don’t even hang a sheet or anything, but if you don’t have a white shed wall or something white – white is best to light up, more moths are attracted to that. Just hang a sheet. Really easy. Just drape it between two things or pin it in place somewhere and put a bright light on it and you’ll see a lot. You’d probably be surprised how much stuff comes to it.

Now, if you really want to be serious, mercury vapor bulbs are the best. They emit a frequency of light that’s more attractive to moths, but they’re a lot more expensive. But that’s what I use is a mercury vapor bulb. The other important bulb, if you want to do this in your backyard, is a black light. You know, the purple ones those of a certain age would hang posters on their wall and put a black light in front to make them look cosmic. Same light, and they attract a different group of moths. And this is all things you can do in your backyard. You’d be astonished at what you’ll get. It’s not hard to do.

Then, if you’re exceptionally bold, take a gallon jug. Drink half the milk, and then let it sit out in the hot sun for a few days and really get rancid. Then dump a bunch of brown sugar, maybe some flat beer in there, and shake it all up. And then just spew that on tree trunks and you’ll get a whole other group of moths, this is called bait, like the underwing moths that are so cool. They don’t come to lights that often, but they’ll come to the bait, like what I just described on tree trunks much more readily. So those are the three ways to pretty easily attract moths.

Shannon: And that’s a different recipe than I’m used to hearing for making the bait for moths. I’m used to hearing fruit based ones.

Jim: Oh, okay. Well that’s probably more friendly. Go with that. That’s better than what I said.

Shannon: I’m guessing it’d bring possibly a different group, but if you’re putting sugar in the milk and getting it all fermented, it’s still fermentation. So, maybe it might be the same group.

Jim: Yeah. I think the sugar is a big key to it too. And yeah, rotten apple cores, anything like that. Butterflies and moths will come to those. Anything like that, but probably the biggest bang for the buck are lights on a white substrate, whether it’s a shed wall or wall of a house or a white sheet or something. That’s what we do when we go out to do it hardcore – usually white sheets stretched up with mercury vapor lights and black lights.

Shannon: Yeah, that’s always really fun to do – is to put the sheets out and see what all comes. I mean, you can get so many really interesting moths coming.

Jim: Your neighbors will think some UFO land in your backyard depending on your light setup. But if you don’t have problems there and you can keep that going, there is a distinct shift of moths coming out.

So, you get stuff not long after nightfall. But like the big silk moths like lunas and cercropia and polyphemus and those sorts of things that people really like to see, we’ve noticed that midnight and later is much better for those. Early, you just generally don’t get that many.

Then, even into the wee hours of early morning, you’ll still get a different sequence. So, a common strategy for us is moth until you run out of steam, maybe that’s midnight or one o’clock. Go crash. And then set your alarm for about 4, 4:30 and just get up. You don’t have to stay up but just go out and see what happened.

The most dramatic experience I ever saw of this, is David Wagner and I were mothing in Adams County in southern Ohio one night. Dave…

Uh, uh, gosh, I wish I could, Hold on just a second.

There’s Dave’s book, one of his books. This is the epic book.

Shannon: I love that book. I’ve got it too.

Jim: Everyone should have it. Caterpillars of Eastern North America. So he’s a friend of mine and so David Wagner. He and I were mothing in Adams County one night and ran out of steam at, I don’t know, 12:30 or so. We came back out at 4 or 4:30 in the morning.

There were a lot of moths there when we left, this is a really wild area, on the sheets. And a migratory group of armyworm moths had dropped in, and we figured there was something like 3,000 moths on every possible subject. The sheet was covered with them. All the walls, anywhere the light sphere connected.

So, this is yet another phenomenon of moths, it’s not well known, is the migratory tendencies of a number of species. And these armyworm moths, they will move in such numbers that they’ll show up on weather radars. It’s that obvious.

And so, one of those groups had flown over our location and a couple thousand of them joined the party. And it was really dramatic to see that in real life. So, you never know what will happen, but more often that’s when we’ll see more of the luna moths and the really big, cool silk moths is when we get back up at 4 or 4:30. There’s more of them out then.

Shannon: And is there anything that we need to be thinking about conservation wise if we go out and we set up all these lights and we’re watching them all night, or like you said, go for a while, go to sleep, come back in the morning and look at them?

Jim: Yes. Yeah. And thank you for bringing that up because I forgot to mention this. One of the other purposes of getting up at 4 or 4:30 is not only just to see what came in, but then to scare them all back into the woods and turn the lights off.

Otherwise, the titmice and chickadees and all the other songbirds are going to have a field day and you’re taking a ton of moths out of the gene pool. And we don’t want to do that.

I mean, our perfect goal, and this is mine as a photographer even with subjects, is no one dies. I don’t want anyone dying.

So yes, it’s almost incumbent upon a person to when they turn the lights off, hopefully while it’s still dark, shake the sheet, whatever, get them all back out into the woods so they can survive and reproduce themselves.

These titmice, especially these little rascals, are so quick to figure this stuff out. And then the titmice alert their buddies and the chickadees come over. And so, we don’t want that. So, just scare them off before it gets light.

Tips for Moth Photography

Shannon: And since you’re a photographer and you’ve talked several times about taking pictures of them and how cool it is, can you give us some tips about how to photograph moths? Because I think a lot of people aren’t real familiar with trying to take pictures in the dark, which of course, most of our moths we’re going to see at night.

Jim: Yeah. Oh, that’s another good question. And I get that a lot.

I’ve kind of discovered a magical recipe. Now, I shoot with high-end gear. I use Canon. It’s the R5, their mirrorless camera, for moths mostly with a 100mm macro lens. But even a phone will do this.

These iPhones now, they’re so good sometimes I just want to sell my stuff, except they don’t reach out for birds. So, they don’t have that yet going for them. So even iPhones are what a lot of people use and there’s certain settings that make them better for nighttime stuff. But I think just an iPhone with default settings can do a really, really great job of them.

But if you get into a little higher end stuff, even a point and shoot camera. All right? But if the point and shoot camera has a manual feature, the dreaded manual that no one wants to use. That’s what you want to use though. It’s not hard.

And the settings are this in manual on any point and shoot, or SLR camera that has a manual mode. F16, 200th of a second shutter speed, and ISO 200. 200, 200, F16. That’s all you need to know.

The camera, if it’s not already, and it usually is defaulted to what’s called TTL mode – through the lens metering. So, the camera talks to the flash and tells the flash how much light to throw out depending on the environment.

It’s bulletproof almost. I want a lot of depth of field because of the little nooks and crannies of moths. So, I don’t want a real open F5.6 or something aperture. I want F16.

If we’re going to get really wonky. I notice that if I stop down much more than F16, like F22, to get even more depth of fuel, I start to see this phenomena. I think it’s called chromatic aberration. I just see a little warping. Maybe it’s only me, but to me it seems to start to manifest. So, I don’t like it. F16, I don’t see any of that. And I’m getting plenty of depth of field with F16. So that’s why I use F16. But generally, once those settings are dialed in, it’s bulletproof.

All you got to do is make sure your flash has batteries, if it needs them and it works. And you’re off to the races. You don’t have to worry about settings. I don’t want to worry about settings generally, unless I have to. I want to focus on composition, things like that.

Here’s another trick too that’s really important for photography. Now that we’ve figured out how to just set the camera and we don’t have to worry about that. Posing your subject. There’s a rule. It’s almost inviolate.

The smaller and smoother the moth is, the less likely you can move it if you reach your finger for it or a stick or a leaf to get it on off the white sheet. They don’t look good on white sheets. I don’t generally want to photograph them on those. So, I want to move them to a more pleasing substrate, but they’ll fly the little smooth small ones. Oh, it’s so hard to work with them.

The bigger and fuzzier they are, the easier they are to manipulate to the point where you get to a cecropia or a luna, these are just child’s play. All you do is push your finger in front of their feet and they climb right up on your finger and you take them, you can show them to the whole group for 20 minutes and you can go put them on a walnut leaf, which is a common host plant for lunas. So, you can move them around.

So, if possible, move them off the white sheet. It’ll be rule one for composition. And, if you know enough to know what the host plant of the moth is and it’s around, that’s perfect in my world. You know, put it on its own host plan. And then you’ve got the most meaningful photograph.

Because you know, the real reason in my view, this is at least for me personally, for photography, is to tell a story. That’s why I started doing it because I started getting out on the speaking circuit almost 30 years ago. And back then I wasn’t shooting much and didn’t know what I was doing and had to beg and borrow and steal photos to do this. I didn’t like it.

Partly, I didn’t want to have to beg for photos. But two, they weren’t really what I wanted. I’m like, “Well, why don’t I just learn to do this for myself?” And then that became an infatuation with the equipment because you have to be a bit of a techno nerd with cameras the way they are now, but if I can learn it anyone can learn it, to take a good picture. But I’m more interested in the story. That’s why I’m taking these photos.

So, if you can have a luna moth on a walnut limb with a walnut attached, maybe he’s even perched on the walnut. Now, you faked it, but it’s not fake, really. That’s what she would lay her eggs on. Much, much better. Now you’ve got this whole story unraveled in one photograph of the host plant that it needs. Plus, it’s going to look a lot cooler aesthetically. So, composition is really big. I’m really, really keen on that. We want to make them look good.

And then look at the moth, or caterpillar for that matter, from every angle. For instance, the promethean moth. That’s a big silk moth. Spectacular. The caterpillar looks like something Seussean. It looks like it’s out of a Dr. Seuss story. It’s comical looking with little horns.

Well, we learned that if… You know, everyone looks at the head, we’re drawn eyes. I’m looking at your eyes. We look at eyes and heads. Break one’s self of that and look at their butts. So, if you look at the butt of a promethean caterpillar, it’s a smiling unicorn – a little yellow horn sticking up over the butt with a little black smiley face with little eye dots. It’s the most amazing thing.

So never fail to try to look at a subject from all angles and see what you get too. In addition, to putting it on a better substrate than a white sheet.

Shannon: That’s really helpful and interesting and I love the telling the story with the pictures. And knowing those settings, I mean, to me knowing what settings to put the camera on is one of the hardest things to figure out. And I usually just do it by trial and error, but to be able to set it and then forget it and just concentrate, like you said on the subject and the composition and telling that story is really helpful too.

Jim: It’s almost paradoxical in that you would think nighttime work would be the hardest photographically, but it’s not. It’s like the easiest. Because in general, that F16, ISO 200, shutter speed 200, it’s just bulletproof. That’s all I do. And I rarely even get off that at night.

Whereas with birds, oh my God, I’m forever changing things, depending on light and subject and its relationship to me. And if it’s a swallow or it’s just some crane standing, you know, you’re always fiddling with settings, with birds and even landscapes, things like that.

Moths at night, nah, never do. Just lock those settings in and you’re pretty much good to go. Then you can put all your attention on moving subjects to better substrates and posing them and creating the best story you can out of your photo.

Shannon: It becomes point and shoot at that point.

Jim: But that’s good. There’s nothing wrong with that. You know, I’m not all about making these photos hard for the sake of making them hard technologically because it’s more impressive. I could care less about that. I just want a simple way to get the photo that works. And it’s pretty bulletproof.

Matter of fact, you can tell basically a whole moth story in three photos. There’s always a conference moth for Mothapalooza that’s coming up this weekend. This one it’s the rosy maple moth that we already talked about.

So, the caterpillar. The caterpillar, by the way, is a gorgeous bag of goo. It’s called the green stripe maple worm at that stage. Then the pink and yellow moth it becomes. And a picture of the maple tree.

Matter of fact, here’s the best picture, which I did get finally once. When you look at something like a rosy maple moth and it’s garishly, pink and yellow, one of the first questions that would pop to mind, at least for me, is “Why? Why would you look like that?”

Most of these animals are quite cryptic. You know, like if you look at a spotted apatelodes moth, it looks more like a leaf than a leaf looks like. You can’t see these things to save your life when they’re on the leaf litter, which is another thing we should talk about leaf litter and moths.

But anyway, to finish this story, so I’m, I’m looking at these rosy maple moths for years. I’m like, “Why? Why are you pink and yellow?”

I was leading a trip in West Virginia a number of years ago now, and there was a rosy maple moth on the wall. This stone wall by this river, and I look up and just right over it is a red maple in full fruit with the little helicopters, samaras, the fruit, hanging down. They’re perfectly pink and yellow. And that’s its host plant. So I go, “Wow.” And I lifted the moth up.

Remember the fuzzy rule? These are hyper fuzzy. You can just pick them right up. I put him on my finger. Put him up to those pink and yellow fruit of the maple, and he climbed right onto the fruit. And I got this amazing picture. Always get oohs and aahs when I show it in the talk. Because it’s just so weird, you know, this thing looks more like those maple seeds than the maple seeds.

So I’m like, maybe that’s why that first brood, at least that coincides with the maple fruit. Once they get on those, pink and yellow is perfect. That’s what you want. So, there’s usually a reason for these things.

Shannon: Yeah, and I mean, you’re right, when you just see the rosy maple moth away from the maple trees or away from the samaras, the helicopters, like that, it doesn’t even look like it should be real. It looks like something somebody should have made because it is so pink and so yellow, and it’s like, “why?” Like you said, “Why? Why would you do this?”

Jim: I know it is weird, and that might be one of the reasons though. Is that it mirrors the fruit of the very tree it’s using as a host plant. So, you never know. I don’t know if that’s why, but when you see that picture, you’ve got to at least wonder.

The Importance of Leaf Litter

Jim: You know, I mentioned this moth called the spotted apatelodes. It’s a pretty common moth, a really spectacular thing, but it is a leaf litter mimic to the nth degree. The big cecropia moths, that’s our largest regularly occurring moth in our part of the world, a big silk moth, also is a big leaf litter rooster. As adults they lay in the leaf litter. So many moths do.

Next time if you’re out in the summer or warmer seasons and you’re walking through leaf litter, watch all the little moths coming out of there. There’s even a group called the litter moths, you know, because their caterpillars eat leaf litter.

So, this thing that we tend to hear about preserving leaf litter in garden beds and things, that is totally legit. When someone takes one of those gas powered leaf blowers with their ear protection on to save their ears because they’re so loud and annihilates some big leafy garden bed, they’ve just laid waste to myriad organisms, not the least of which are moths. So, leaf litter, keep it wherever possible.

Shannon: You’re talking about the moths themselves, the adult moths using the leaf litter, and then you’ve got all the ones that over winter in the leaf litter as caterpillars and stuff. Including the one that everybody loves as a caterpillar, the wooly worm or wooly bears, are leaf litter hibernators or over winterers.

Jim: Yeah. And then all the cocoons too that are in there, you’re right. That’s a good point. You know, it’s how they get through the winter, many of them.

Shannon: Yeah. I mean, that leaf litter plays a huge role in so many different ways for so many different organisms.

Jim: Mm-hmm. Yeah. The wooly bear, that’s a good one too. I think that’s in our book as well because we had to put it in. But, that is probably the only moth, I’m guessing, that more people know the caterpillar than they know the moth it becomes. As a matter of fact, almost no one would know the moth that it becomes. And it’s a gorgeous, gorgeous moth.

But the caterpillar, of course, is so conspicuous and North Carolina has a huge wooly bear festival, I think. We have one up here in Vermilion, Ohio. So, kind of a weird one in the moth world, but very good looking at both stages, caterpillar and moth. It’s called the Isabella tiger moth as an adult, completely different name.

Conservation and Native Plants

Shannon: So, this has been a really fun and interesting conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. And I mean, I’m sure we could go on for hours, having this conversation, but if there’s one thing that you want our listeners to remember from this conversation, what would that be?

Jim: Native plants. Can’t drum it in enough. Native plants make the world go round for those of us interest in conservation.

And there’s no reason someone that owns a quarter or a third acre city or suburban lot cannot be a conservationist. They absolutely can be. But you won’t do very well at your conservation job if you don’t use native plants. They just make the world go round. It cannot be emphasized enough.

Really, our Gardening for Moths book, it’s really a native plant book. I often say this. Tomorrow night at Cullowhee, North Carolina, I’m going to give tomorrow night’s keynote on this subject. And I usually at the beginning of the talk, just say, “You know, this is really a native plan talk.”

Because everything pivots around native flora when we grow insects, and insects feed the rest of the world in large part. So that’s where it all starts. So, I would just reemphasize that often heard point, and no one’s been a better evangelist for that than Doug Tallamy, who you’ve had on your show.

Shannon: Yeah, that is such a key point, is to incorporate as many natives as possible, and as many different types as possible. Because yeah, I mean, you’re on a small suburban lot, relatively speaking. I know lots of people that are on small suburban lots, and some in some very large cities, and they’ve got tons of birds and insects and just all kinds of cool things in their yard because they’re growing the native plants and they’re doing what they can on that small piece of property.

Jim: Absolutely. And thank you for your work too with your show and other resources for pushing that message.

Shannon: Oh, you’re welcome.

Resources and Final Thoughts

Shannon: But yeah, I will put links in the show notes to your book if anybody wants to learn how to garden for moths, which I really recommend your book. It is a very good one.

Jim: Thank you.

Shannon: I’ll also have links for your website. You’re welcome. I’ll have a link to your website, to your blog. And then you were telling me, off camera and in some of our emails that you’ve got a new book that just came out too on dragonflies and damselflies of Ohio.

Jim: Oh yeah. Um, right…there…

Shannon: Nice.

Jim: Yeah, that’s it. We’re proud of this book. It’s not, by any means, just an identification guide. It’s a life history treatment. Now it’s only, you know, it’s for Ohio, but insects and animals and plants don’t respect political boundaries one iota. They’re meaningless to that group.

So, all these things are in all the surrounding states as well. So, it would work in states at least adjacent to Ohio very, very well. And even beyond that, probably. So, yeah, that just came out this year.

Shannon: Yeah, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes too so that people can look at that because I found that a lot of our listeners are like, I am and like it sounds like you are. And, we just like to geek out about everything that’s nature oriented.

Jim: Isn’t that cool? That’s cool to see. You know, it didn’t always used to be that way. When I was a young birder, it was really bird centric, you know? And then, I just watched this, what over a long periods become a sea change in how people view nature and the environment in a much more holistic way. And I think you’re right. People are into facets of natural history now.

Oh! And then Mothapalooza. Remember Mothapalooza in there.

Shannon: Yes, and Mothapalooza. Thank you for reminding me. I will definitely have Mothapalooza in there as well. And, if we think of any more between now and the time this episode comes out, I can always add more.

So definitely if you’re listening to this, go down and look at the show notes at all the resources. I’m sure we’re going to have a nice long list for people there by the time this is over with.

So yeah, thank you so much for sharing your story and all your knowledge with us today because I’ve really enjoyed it. So, thank you again.

Jim: Thank you. And I enjoyed talking to you. It was really great.

If you would like a free checklist of tips on how to easily observe and photograph moths that I created from this conversation, then check out the bonus content link in the show notes.

As always, I want to thank our Patrons and other financial supporters who go above and beyond to help us produce free content focused on creating thriving backyard ecosystems that you can enjoy and be proud of.