Much Ado About Mothing: A year intoxicated by Britain’s rare and remarkable moths

By James Lowen

James Lowen narrates a year-long quest to see Britain's rarest and more remarkable moths.

Although mostly unseen by us, moths are everywhere. And their capacity to delight astounds.

Inspired by a revelatory encounter with a Poplar Hawk-moth – a huge, velvety-winged wonder wrapped in silver – James Lowen embarks on a year-long quest to celebrate the joy of Britain's rarest and most remarkable moths. By hiking up mountains, wading through marshes and roaming by night amid ancient woodlands, James follows the trails of both Victorian collectors and present-day conservationists. Seeking to understand why they and many ordinary folk love what the general public purports to hate, his investigations reveal a heady world of criminality and controversy, derring-do and determination.

From Cornwall to the Cairngorms, James explores British landscapes to coax these much-maligned creatures out from the cover of darkness and into the light. Moths are revealed to be attractive, astonishing and approachable; capable of migratory feats and camouflage mastery, moths have much to tell us on the state of the nation's wild and not-so-wild habitats.

As a counterweight to his travels, James and his young daughter track the seasons through a kaleidoscope of moth species living innocently yet covertly in their suburban garden. Without even leaving home, they bond over a shared joy in the uncommon beauty of common creatures, for perhaps the greatest virtue of moths, we learn, is their accessibility. Moths may be everywhere, but above all, they are here. Quite unexpectedly, no animals may be better placed to inspire the environmentalists of the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: May 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781472966995

James Lowen

James Lowen is an experienced naturalist and award-winning author whose books include Much Ado About Mothing, British Moths, Birds of France and Bloomsbury's RSPB Spotlights on Badgers and Hedgehogs. Two of his books received the accolade of Travel Guidebook of the Year, and James also writes for publications such as The Telegraph, BBC Wildlife, Nature's Home and The Countryman. jameslowen.com / @JLowenWildlife

Book preview

Whether recounting nights spent searching for moths amid the heather or relating an autumn dedicated to the perfect blue of Clifden Nonpareil, this boy can write!

David Gedge of The Wedding Present

If moths mean nothing to you, opening this book is like stumbling from a dark street into an unexpected party. Here is colour, wonder, surprise – and fun. A jolly, generous, kind-hearted host, James Lowen unveils a splendid serving of moth intoxication!

Patrick Barkham, author of The Butterfly Isles

Gloriously uplifting, hilariously eccentric; a big warm hug of a book written straight from the heart. Moths at their most inspiring, nature writing at its finest.

Helen Pilcher, author of Life Changing

James Lowen confesses his love affair with some of Britain’s most overlooked creatures – and, in doing so, reveals the wonder of moths. A delightful book, packed with passion and fascinating detail.

Stephen Moss, naturalist and author

A charming book.

John Ingham, Daily Express

A great read.

Nigel Marven, wildlife presenter and naturalist

This is a book full of enthusiasm and erudition.

Adrian Spalding, Atropos

Lowen brings a charm and wit to these close encounters [with moths], making them personal and intimate, and a delight to read.

Richard Jones, Royal Entomological Society

Written with craft and class […] The ride is as mad as a moth’s meanders.

Dominic Couzens, author and journalist

Written by someone who so ably conveys his passion, Much Ado About Mothing is an enthralling 20-chapter celebration of these winged insects. Accompanied by his abiding enthusiasm and wonder, Lowen’s writing is entertaining, packed with descriptive prose and fascinating facts about his quarry.

Josh Jones, Birdwatch

Charming and awe-inspiring. Whether you love or loathe moths, this book is for you.

Kate Bradbury, author of The Bumblebee Flies Anyway

With prose as rich and velvety as a Black Rustic’s wings, in Much Ado About Mothing James Lowen shines a welcome light into the hidden world of Britain’s moths [...] their stories are remarkable and, in this delicious book, Lowen serves them with the relish they deserve.

Jon Dunn, author of Orchid Summer

James has a great way with words and brings moths to life, from the tiniest micro to the largest macro.

Dave Grundy, Comma

This journey introduces the reader to many astonishing species [...] a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Ashleigh Whiffin, BBC Wildlife

A very good read. Highly enjoyable.

Mark Avery, conservationist and co-founder of Wild Justice

A Note on the Author

James Lowen is an award-winning author specialising in travel and natural history, two of his 13 books receiving the accolade of Travel Guidebook of the Year. After living in South America and working variously as an Antarctic tour guide and environmental policymaker, James now combines writing articles for UK newspapers and magazines with raising his daughter.

In his forties, having long disdained moths, the scales fell from James’s eyes, inspiring him to write both Much Ado About Mothing, which was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for nature writing and chosen as Country Life magazine’s ‘Book of the Week’, and British Moths: A Gateway Guide (Bloomsbury Wildlife, 2021).

@JLowenWildlife

www.jameslowen.com

To Maya, Sharon and Will

In memoriam Douglas Boyes (1996–2021)

Bloomsbury%20NY-L-ND-S_US.eps

Contents

    Note on names

    Prologue

1.  The winter garden – and beyond

2.  Cats, tracks and caves

3.  The spring garden – leaves, twigs and bird craps

4.  (What’s the story) Kentish Glory?

5.  Why H is for Hawk-moth too

6.  The Clearwing King… dethroned

7.  If small is beautiful, how gorgeous is tiny?

8.  Dry zone

9.  Wetsuit

10. Sylvan secrets

11. All the moths look the same

12. The summer garden – and its lost souls

13. Life’s a beach

14. Rock and a hard place

15. Heather

16. New arrivals, welcome?

17. Winged wanderers

18. Perfect blue

19. The autumn garden – of memes and leaves

20. Southern comfort

      Epilogue

Further reading

Acknowledgements

Index

Plates

Note on names

For larger moths, I use the vernacular names published in the Field Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland (written by Paul Waring and Martin Townsend; Bloomsbury, 2017). For smaller moths, I follow the Field Guide to the Micromoths of Great Britain and Ireland (written by Phil Sterling and Mark Parsons; Bloomsbury, 2018). Micromoths are universally known by their scientific names, so I follow suit. However, where Sterling and Parsons include common names, I use those preferentially. On the odd occasion, I also take advantage of common names for micromoths that are in wide usage but do not feature in Sterling and Parsons.

Prologue

I remember the date precisely: 7 July 2012. It was the day my life changed for ever.

It wasn’t the day I got married. Nor was it when our daughter was born. It did involve a female, but it wasn’t a girl or woman. It brought a coup de foudre, a wholly unexpected buckling of the knees, an unanticipated thumping of the heart. For she was arrestingly beautiful. And she was a moth.

To be precise, she was a Poplar Hawk-moth. She was sweetly furry, verging on velvety. This winged wonder was gawkily angular – Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter in animal form. She was wrapped in silver, banded with bronze and grizzled with iron filings. She was enduringly placid, only once flashing me a warning with fiery spots on her underwings. And she was huge and glorious and utterly wrong.

Because moths – I knew this for a fact – were small, brown and dull. At best, they were uninteresting and usually irritating. These eerie creatures of the night remained invisible yet destroyed my suits. Moths were malign phantoms from another realm. My attitude to moths was not, however, constant. Some days I hated them. At other times they merely stultified me. Occasionally I was even indifferent.

How I disappointed my nature-loving buddies! Most, like me, had long expanded their wildlife horizons from birds and mammals to butterflies and dragonflies. Many had jumped the ditch dividing things that move from things that grow, becoming increasingly enamoured by the unabashed ostentation of orchids. Again I was among their number. But not when it came to moths. ‘When,’ I once asked sulkily, ‘will I be so bored of other wildlife that I have to resort to getting kicks from moths?’

For these poor relations of butterflies were (still) small, brown and dull; (still) uninteresting and often irritating. Several friends begged to disagree; they had already seen the light. Andy sang hymns of praise to the hundreds of types of moth that routinely visited his garden. Martin had already inked onto his Christmas list a copy of a new field guide to Britain’s smaller (for which, read often seriously tiny) moths. Mark sought to effect my Damascene conversion to his invertebrate religion with tales of moths that mimicked wasps to evade predation and others – veritable vagabonds – that migrated here from Africa. Evolutionary marvels and the allure of the rare were astute buttons for Mark to press. But still he failed. I remained resolutely anti-moth.

Until my friend James Hunter cracked me on that fateful July day. Then a trainer for a biotech company who was invariably clad in a baseball cap and hoodie, James caught the train from Dartford to Blackheath and wandered uphill to our 1960s terrace. He was joining me on an excursion to a shady Beech hangar in the Chilterns to admire a graceful and near-extinct orchid, the Red Helleborine.

I knew that James was a moth-lover or ‘moth-er’ – naturalist parlance that avoids confusion with the female parent at the expense of pronunciation and ugly punctuation. James spoke readily of tigers and footmen, of waves and wainscots. He had branched out from seeking to attract moths in his garden with the wan, blueish strip light of an actinic bulb. He now thought nothing of running a generator overnight to power super-bright mercury-vapour lights that illuminated Kent’s downland darkness. This exploratory zeal fired my spirit of adventure, which was desperate to be rekindled following several years living in South America. But still moths did not captivate me.

Until, that is, James opened a scruffy rucksack and extracted a Tupperware pot the size of a doorstep sandwich. Something large, grey and winged lurked inside.

‘Mate,’ he said, ‘take a look at this. It’s a Poplar Hawk-moth.’

Grudgingly, I looked. And was immediately, shock­ingly and overwhelmingly smitten. My life has never been the same since.

Admittedly, it took eighteen months for me to really get going with ‘mothing’. Make no bones about it, moths can seem a daunting group of animals to wrap one’s head around. Many people, myself included, find it hard enough to learn Britain’s butterflies, dragonflies and orchids – groups that comprise sixty or fewer different species. Moths are a different ballpark. There are roughly forty times more types of moth in Britain than there are butterflies – some 2,500 species. At the outset, the variety is simply bewildering. Granted, many are striking, colourful and pleasingly easy to identify, but many others look very similar to one another. Picking up an identification guide to moths for the first time risks making your eyes bleed: on some pages, all the moths look the same. And if that wasn’t challenging enough, perhaps two-thirds of Britain’s species are ‘micromoths’, tiny wisps of life whose appreciation demands a hand lens.

Then there’s the kit involved. Unlike butterflies, the vast majority of moths do not flaunt themselves in the sun or pose on flowers. Although 250 or so moths readily choose to fly by day, that still leaves 90 per cent of Britain’s species to emerge only under the cover of darkness. To see them, you need to play canny by attracting them to light – for which moths seemingly have the most bizarre fascination. At its simplest, this can mean leaving a bathroom light on and the window open. A less hit-and-miss approach is to invest in a powerful light source and connect this to an open-mouthed ‘trap’ stacked with egg-boxes on which moths rest, unharmed, after being attracted to or bewildered by the unexpected ground-level ‘moon’. After identifying and photographing the moths, the moth-er returns them to the wild, hiding them deep in vegetation away from the beady eyes of hungry birds. The financial outlay for a moth trap is typically a couple of hundred quid, but it is worth every penny.

Learning to put the right name to moths is like starting to ride a bike: initially impossible but, with practice, pleasingly straightforward. The joy that catching and identifying moths can bring proves unbridled, instructive and revelatory. I would never have guessed that three hundred types of moths – almost double the collective total of species of butterflies, dragonflies and orchids in the whole of Britain – would visit my modest London garden, otherwise unwitnessed. For home is where every moth-er’s experience begins.

Moths make for gloriously lazy wildlife watching. No need to travel, no need to rise early, no need to seek out. Let moths come to you. Pootle out to your trap after breakfast and see what the night has divulged. My daughter and I were routinely astonished and swiftly became addicted. It transpired that moths were not always small and brown. Quite the opposite. Many rendered some butterflies tawdry, others dullards. It became apparent that moths could be brightly coloured, classily patterned and surprisingly large. Some species were all three: Maya fell head over heels for the sizeable, boldly striped and candy-pink Elephant Hawk-moth.

This was particularly gratifying, for we caught scores of them. Here is the other thing about trapping moths: you catch so many. Wander around your garden on a sunny summer day, and you might – if there are suitable nectar sources – see a handful of butterflies. Open your moth trap after a summer night, and you can expect two orders of magnitude more than that. On one remarkable morning during my first proper summer of mothing, there were 2,800 of the winged wonders sitting peaceably inside. Two thousand eight hundred. Roughly 2,500 of them were a single tiny species – Horse-chestnut Leaf-miner (Cameraria ohridella) – but that still left three hundred other types. The sheer volume of moths that are out there, unseen and unappreciated, beggars belief.

That Horse-chestnut Leaf-miner – a beautiful tangerine-toned species, banded with silver – is an interesting one. It was unknown in Britain before 2002, but has spread far and wide across England and Wales, becoming common wherever Horse-chestnut trees grow. This is not, however, a zero-to-hero story but one of zero-to-alleged-villain. Forestry Research, Britain’s public body responsible for tree-related research, classifies Horse-chestnut Leaf-miner as a pest. The moth’s caterpillars munch away the tree’s leaves, causing them to discolour before prematurely falling to the ground. In truth, this does not appear to impoverish the tree’s health. But that, for public body and general public alike, is beside the point. This moth is a pest, and pests must be persecuted.

By lazy association, all moths are vexatious. This one chomps leaves, but others devour our clothes and carpets. And we really don’t like that. Ergo all moths are evil. Worse, they do their ghoulish business unseen, so we have little opportunity to make their acquaintance, to demystify them, to befriend them. Or they fly erratically at us – seemingly in attack. Do they bite, we fret? Then throw in the caterpillars of Brown-tail Moths, which – should you believe the more scaremongering of UK tabloids – can blind you if their hair (somehow) touches your eye, and moths become dangerous as well as destructive.

Pilloried, slighted and vilified, moths are Mother Nature’s bad boys. Butterflies, those poster children of the insect world, have it easy. But here’s a thing: moths and butterflies are one and the same. All are members of the order Lepidoptera (from the Greek: lepis for scale and pteron for wing). In evolutionary terms, butterflies actually nestle as a grouping within moths: the ‘family tree’ sees moths on each side of butterflies. The latter just happen to fly by day and to have club-shaped antennae rather than feathery, ribbed or saw-edged feelers. Other than that, there is little consistent difference – certainly nothing justifying such vastly different public perception. Everyone loves butterflies; everyone seemingly hates moths. By any rational measure, the discrepancy in opinion is untenable.

Fortunately, not quite everyone hates moths. Take my daughter, for instance. Turning four during our inaugural summer of mothing, she could barely read, let alone be indoctrinated by tabloid sensationalism. Maya’s eyes were open to new experiences, unfettered by prejudice. The wild child loved what she saw and, as kids are supremely tactile, adored what she could hold. In two decades of watching butterflies, I can count on one hand the times I have enjoyed direct, physical contact with one: a Green-veined White wiggling onto my outstretched palm; a Green Hairstreak treating my finger as a branch; a Purple Emperor lapping up my sweat through its whirligig proboscis. In contrast, most moths are unfazed extroverts that sit placidly while being examined, and some seemingly even hanker after the human touch. As a device for inspiring kids about nature, there is nothing better or more readily accessible.

Towards the end of that inaugural summer of mothing, we moved house – to a new county, a new life. From a claustrophobically narrow, three-storey house in The Smoke, we relocated to an airy, sprawling bungalow on the outskirts of Norwich, our garden quadrupling in size. Maya could not wrap her head around the move. She had somehow gleaned that we would abandon not just the building but also all its contents – including her toys and our moth trap. It took aeons to reassure her that this was not the case. Yet, evidently enamoured by her time with the winged insects, she was distraught that ‘Daddy’s moths’ would not come with us. Don’t worry so, I soothed, there will be even more moths where we are going. Maya’s face brightened. A smile supplanted tears. Life was going to be OK.

Our Norfolk garden proved pretty good for moths. Perhaps not as startling, at first blush, as London but still pretty good. We took our time making their acquaintance. We discovered how the types of moths ebbed and flowed with the passing of the seasons. We interrogated our visitors’ life stories – marvelling at moths with a prowess for camouflage that would make a chameleon proud (the Buff-tip is a dead ringer for a snapped twig) and at those with antifreeze in their blood (enabling the well-named December Moth to survive early winter chills). We deciphered the connection between caterpillar foodplants in our garden and the adult moths we caught. We gawped at insects whose migratory feats made birds look like wimps, such as the titchy Diamond-back Moths (Plutella xylostella) that arrived from Russia by the thousand.

These last two features – foodplants and migration – illustrate the compelling dichotomy of moths. For foodplant, read place. For migration, read displacement. Place and displacement, location and dislocation. Arguably, no British animals are more entwined with place than are moths. One species, Fisher’s Estuarine Moth, was long thought not to stray beyond ten metres from the plant where it hatched. Another, New Forest Burnet, now resides only on a single, remote sea cliff in west Scotland, exhibiting blatant disregard for its name. With their finicky ecological needs, both species have a fragile grasp on survival; extinction could be just one washed-out summer away. As such, they and many, many other moths tell vibrant stories about the wonderful, varied landscapes they inhabit and how we have transformed them.

In 1976 a single Devon trap operated by the Rothamsted Insect Survey – a nationwide network of sites that provides decades of standardised data about invertebrate populations – caught 4,681 individual moths in one night. I can recall sitting in my parents’ car later that decade as we weaved along the same county’s narrow, hedge-shrouded lanes. Returning to our holiday cottage from an evening meal at the local pub, the balmy summer air would thicken with moths and other winged insects before splattering an untimely end on the windscreen. This phenomenon, enshrined in the title of Michael McCarthy’s environmental treatise The Moth Snowstorm, is no more. Within a generation, the moths have vanished. Driving back from a nearby village inn, with Maya dozing in the back, I spot just three. Official statistics, compiled by the wildlife charity Butterfly Conservation, back up this subjective impression. The populations of many British species have bellyflopped by as much as 80 per cent over thirty years. Their mass disappearance is trying to tell us something about how we are treating our countryside.

But enough already about place. What about displacement? Here too, moths are winged messengers for the state of our planet. As we have seen, the Horse-chestnut Leaf-miners that thronged my London trap were unknown in Britain twenty years ago. Last century, seeing this flaming-orange, burning-eyed insect would have been a moth-er’s dream. Then they arrived, colonised, prospered, spread, prospered some more and spread some more. And they are far from alone. Whereas Britain’s contingent of butterflies is pretty much fixed – with only sporadic attempts at establishment by continental residents such as Queen of Spain Fritillary and Long-tailed Blue – each year sees a fair group of moths recorded here for the first time. Some are one-off migrants. Others – Sombre Brocade, Tree-lichen Beauty, Gypsy Moth and their ilk – have swiftly become resident. Still others are tentatively following suit. All bear witness to a changing climate and to the interconnectivity of a globalised world.

After we fled London in favour of a quieter, simpler and smaller life in Norfolk, the other thing that struck me about moths was that I was no longer alone. When in London, the nearest friend who ran a moth trap lived ten miles distant, in Kent. I basically had nobody to share sightings with or to guide my learning. Around Norwich, however, there was a thriving community of moth-ers. Gradually, we compared notes on who had caught what, where and when. Tentatively, we answered one another’s identification conundrums. And, when we trapped something exciting or exotic, we started to invite our brothers- and sisters-in-arms to come and see it.

Knowledge, companionship and horizons expanded. I realised there was a moth world beyond my garden. Initially it comprised fellow moth-ers’ homes. Then I learned that nature reserves and Butterfly Conservation organised ‘moth mornings’. Aiming to enthuse people about moths, they invited the public to attend the opening of traps sited in landscapes as diverse as reedbeds and rivers, heathland and fen. I had seen four hundred different types of moths so far, but here were ways to potentially double that. Entire pages of the field guide, where the paintings were as much myth as moth, suddenly became available for first-hand scrutiny. Blinkers had fallen from my eyes.

This got me thinking: there comes a point in any new undertaking where you yearn to take a big step forward; it is human nature to push boundaries, to explore further, to go beyond. I found myself craving more moths, different moths, moths elsewhere, moths from elsewhere. I had heard of birdwatchers doing ‘big years’, striving to see three hundred-plus types of bird within twelve months. I had read books by nature writers who had taken things a step further, aiming to cram all of Britain’s dragonflies, butterflies, orchids, rare animals or rare plants into a single year or so. My heart was telling me with passion that it was time to devote a similar chunk of my life to moths.

But what should The Quest comprise? There are relatively few butterflies, dragonflies and orchids in Britain, so seeing them all in a year is a realistic ambition, but only a fool would attempt a clean sweep of Britain’s two thousand-plus moths in a single year. There are more than enough species for an entire lifetime – and with newbies added every year, the full house is a moving target. I am a novice moth-er: seeing my remaining 1,800 new moths in a year is unimaginable. Yet targeting just, say, fifty moths would be a betrayal of moths’ stellar diversity, their evolutionary prowess. Instead, I decided to see an ambitious and varied suite of scarce and special creatures, each with a tale worth telling. I elected to pursue quality over quantity – prioritising Britain’s rarest and most remarkable moths. I would target masters of camouflage and deception, conservation success stories and failures, new arrivals and elusive species, the protected and the pestilent. I would revel in the boldly colourful, but also find beauty in the tiny. Above all, I would deepen my understanding of why moths are brilliant – and then shout the answers from the rooftops.

Seeing my desired 120-ish non-garden-dwelling species would involve travelling to many places, landscapes and habitats that would be new to me, but also enable me to view familiar locations through a fresh filter. My quest would take me from England’s southwestern tip to northern Scotland. I would camp out in ancient woodlands and idle across sunny heathlands. I would slosh through bogs and yomp up mountains. Along the way, I intended to retrace paths followed by Victorian collectors who provided the baseline for our understanding of British moths while making a decent living out of trading prized specimens. I would even chance my arm at rediscovering species feared extinct.

The counterweight to such travels would be our suburban garden. Here, at a relaxed pace and with contrasting ease, my daughter and I would track the seasons through moths, taking joy in the uncommon beauty of common creatures. For perhaps the greatest virtue of moths is their accessibility. Moths are everywhere, but above all they are here.

I was under no illusions that such weighty travels would be easy. Quite the opposite – even discounting the impact on family and finances. Unlike orchids and other plants, moths move, so grid references rarely help. Unlike butterflies, most moths hide by day so need to be sought in the pitch-black. To avoid thousand-mile failures, I would need up-to-date information, assessments of the impact of unseasonable weather, specialist equipment, patience, sharp eyes and luck – plus a bottomless pit of help and goodwill on the part of numerous experts, whether amateur moth-ers or professional conservationists.

This in itself was propitious, for my curiosity was increasingly piqued not solely by moths but by the people who choose to watch, trap, count, study, photograph and protect them. I wanted to understand why they do so – particularly when society’s prevailing attitude is one of disgust for the object of their love. I wanted to learn how and why moth-ers get into moths. I wanted to understand how moths impact their lives and how moths make them feel. Initial sleuthing suggested there might be moth-ers every bit as obsessive as the bird-chasing twitchers who sometimes make the news. Through the filter of moths, what might I learn about the concept of obsession, both within other people and myself as the year unfolded? That initiatory Poplar Hawk-moth – huge, glorious and utterly wrong – would, I suspected, have a lot to answer for.

1

The winter garden – and beyond

Norfolk

January–March

It’s an unexpected, blessed cure for a New Year’s Day hangover: the rejuvenation of Alka-Seltzer, but in the form of a moth.

Struggling from bed, I grump about before slouching off in search of restorative eggs and juice. But before even passing through the supermarket’s sliding doors, I am revived. On one of its towering plate-glass windows, gripping Spiderman-like to the pane’s smoothness and transfixed by the light from within, sits my inaugural moth of the year. In normal circumstances, I might overlook it as a dirty thumbprint. But this year’s circumstances are anything but normal. Throughout my quest, moths will be my new brown.

Unperturbed, the creature allows me to approach its rounded, dust-grey equilateral triangle. I get close enough to examine the gentle undulations of light and dark playing across its inch-wide wings. It is a male Winter Moth. Although not a rare species – far from it – it is remarkable, joyous and headache-alleviating.

The duality of moths underpins their attraction. In essence, they are out-of-scope creatures, inhabiting a world other to our own – that of darkness. Shine a light, however, and they materialise. The emptiness is revealed to be replete, and your garden confesses its inner nature reserve.

There is no universally accepted explanation for moths’ draw to flame. One theory holds that lamps are mistaken for a celestial cue used in orientation – a low-hanging moon, in other words. Another suggests that night-flying insects are dazzled; another that they are overstimulated. It doesn’t help our understanding that light affects different moths in different ways: some spiral around the source; others crash into it. Some settle at a distance; others ignore it. Nor does it help that some moths seem indifferent to particular wavelengths of ultraviolet light, yet are attracted to others. Mercury-vapour (MV) bulbs attract five times as many moths as high-pressure sodium streetlamps. Actinic bulbs seduce winter-flying moths more than summer-active types. And the jury’s out on what effect new-fangled LED lights have. But put some kind of light in your garden and moths will come.

So I do. On 151 dusks across the year, I fire up my MV or actinic traps, curious to learn what visits the family hearth while we snore. The dazzling MV demands a berth in the secluded front garden, whereas the less obtrusive actinic will not disturb neighbours out back. Neither garden is large: the front a badminton court, at best; the back a quarter of that. Our Norwich bungalow is distinctly suburban – on an anonymous 1920s housing estate, its previously husbanded vegetation has been left to rewild in the absence of chemicals. Although beloved, it is hardly special.

But moths get everywhere. Even an inner-city location such as London’s Natural History Museum garden has racked up six hundred species – including one new for the UK. You don’t even need a garden. In the absence of outside space, two flat-dwelling friends independently installed a moth trap in their respective bedrooms, opening windows to allow moths in. Each caught hundreds of species, their totals limited only by extinguishing the light come bedtime. With moths, anything