National Moth Week 2023 is over, actually has been over for a while, and although I didn’t see a lot of showy moths, I did see a nice sampling. The technique I used was a lightsheet and a few wine ropes (rags). That setup is a white sheet hung between trees with UV lights aimed towards the sheet. It was an interesting learning experience and one I plan to repeat despite moth week being over.

Things I discovered…

• Folding down the corners of the sheets by about 2″ and then sewing them gave me little pockets that I could use to thread rope through to hang them easier. This was much better than using clothes pins since a little wind would often knock the clothes pins out of place. And I found that plastic flagging tape worked best because I could just break off the appropriate length of tape each time I hung the sheet–I didn’t need any special tools like a knife or scissors. There is enough tape on a roll for almost any situation.
• So I hung the sheet up by the top corners and tied off the bottom corners to wooden branches or other weighty debris nearby to keep the sheet steady despite any breezes that might pop up.
• For the lights themselves, I found that grow lights worked almost better than the party UV lights that I’d originally gotten, although I ended up using a combination of both to maximize my chances. The grow lights I have had five heads so one head I pointed up/outward so moths would see the light and be drawn to the sheet. This worked much better than simply pointing all the lights at the sheet.
• To support the lights, I found an old “walker” at the dump. Then I placed a scrap piece of wood on top of the walker to form a shelf which supported the lights at about waist height. Since the walker could be folded up at the end of the night, it was easy to bring along and with the scrap board, it could support any kind of light. My tripods couldn’t actually do that since most of the lights I have are designed to sit on a flat surface. So that worked well for me. I could also hang lights from the walker bars, so it gave me a lot of flexibility.
• In addition to a regular white bed sheet, I found that a shower curtain liner that was white and textured also worked well.
• The “wine ropes” were actually rags in my case. I got some really cheap sweet local wine and simmered it with sugar until it was syrupy (I didn’t measure anything in terms of amount, but it looked like about equal parts wine and sugar). Then I soaked rags in it and hung those up from branches of nearby trees. A lot of insects including moths really liked those rags and almost immediately started showing up.
• The moth wisdom is that the big showy moths like the Imperial Moth don’t start showing up until around 2 AM. This was not my experience at all. In fact, my experience (and looking at the observations on iNaturalist) indicated that if any moths were going to show up, they showed up within the first 3 hours. In my case, that was from 9PM until about 11PM. After that, no new moths showed up and in fact, I started seeing fewer and fewer moths as the night progressed as many left and never returned. I stayed up until 3AM on several nights with the same results. I tried several different locations. The peak occurred within the first 3 hours and then everything diminished. The wee hours of the morning were nearly bereft of all moth life. I have to say that when we’ve seen Luna Moths in the past, it has always been during that 9PM to 11PM window. So I don’t know what to say about that conventional moth wisdom. Or the wisdom that says different moths show up as the night progresses. My experiences simply did not support these two theories. But everyone has different experiences. Perhaps it is location dependent. I’m in the southeast and basically in a forested swamp area with agricultural fields in front of the house and the forest/swamp behind the house.

So what kinds of moths did I see? Below are some of my observations from Moth Week.

I was really pleased to see the Virginia Creeper Sphinx and saw that moth in the swamp, as opposed to our backyard which is a cleared area with a few trees that backs up to a mixed hardwood forest. The Green-dusted Zale Moth came to one of the wine rags, along with the Sweet Potato Armyworm Moth.

Another group of moths is below which includes the Sweet Potato Armyworm Moth, again visiting a wine-sugar soaked rag. I was particularly fascinated by the delicate pattern on the armyworm moth.

While I didn’t see any of the more colorful moths, these still have lovely coloration and were a treat to see.

Here is the Hieroglyphic Moth which was a true treat. I didn’t even realize we had them here, right in my backyard.

And we didn’t get just moths. When I ran my lightsheet in the swamp, I got a Two-striped Forceptail dragonfly. In addition, several Fragile Forktails (Ischnura posita) visited the lights but didn’t stick around to be photographed.

And on the first night I ran my lightsheet in the backyard, I got this lovely little cicada. Once more, I had no idea that these guys were nearby.

So it was quite an interesting week and I intend to run the lightsheet a few more times before summer ends. You just never know what will show up!