Leaves from a Nature Notebook

Shakespeare's Moths

  “Thus hath the candle singed the moth. O these deliberate fools! When they do choose, They have the wisdom by their wit to lose.”

Portia, The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare

Quite the entomologist, the Bard. If Shakespeare understood the fatal attraction of moths to flame (they, in all probability, confuse the latter with the moon of navigation), he also knew the magick of moths, who are so perpetually overlooked in favour of their more famous cousins, butterflies. Shakespeare grants the name ‘Moth’ to the tiniest of Titania’s fairy band in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Moths do indeed seem to be, when whirling from sweet-scented flower to sweet-scented flower in midsummer dusk, emissaries from the court of the Fairie Queen.

Or couriers of letters from secret lovers, or representations of the soul. In eras more imaginative and nature-bountiful than ours, such as Tudor England, moths were all these things and more. Poor butterflies. Their lives are but a flashy, prancy hour of superficial delight. Moths touch primal loves and fears  –  the sight of a ghost moth, Hepialus humuli, hovering, white and spectral, over a meadow in moonlight will unnerve even an empiricist, and the death’s-head hawk-moth (Acherontia atropos ) is a cultural symbol of doom from Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native through to the 1991 horror movie The Silence of the Lambs, via Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd. Understandably.

The death’s-head hawk-moth is so named because the markings on its thorax resemble a skull. The scientific name, Acherontia atropos, is little comfort, Atropos being the third of the Greek Fates (the one who snipped the thread of life with her scissors) and Acheron the River of Woe in the Greek Underworld. Equally melancholic, the death’s-head hawk-moth allegedly tumbled King George III into one of his bouts of ‘madness’ when the moth entered into  his bedroom in 1801. One feels for him; the death’s-head will, very un-moth-like, squeak as though talking. Acherontia atropos is only a rare vagrant to British shores, flapping its way here on five-inch wings from southern Europe and Africa.

Acherontia atropos

Following this feat of migration, it takes its title as ‘Britain’s largest moth’. The death’s-head has a sweet side, entering bee nests and hives in a hunt for honey, making itself ‘chemically invisible’ to its hosts by mimicking their cutaneous fatty acids. The whopping four-inch-long caterpillar, usually a fetching shade of banana, feeds on potato leaves.

Moths slough off our casual stereotyping, our crude classifications of nature. Moths are the thinking person’s, the soul person’s, Lepidoptera. Emissaries from the Other. Some moths are indeed, plain, pre-ball Cinderellas, but drabness is evolutionary perfection to escape detection; in the case of the lappet moth, its wings are the exact colour of withered bramble leaves, enabling the insect to lie-up during the day unremarked by predators. So much for the unremarked: the adult elephant hawk-moth is a Disney princess’s idea of a butterfly, all dressed up in velveteen pink and gold.

The beautiful elephant hawk-moth

Moths, they provoke the mind. Moths evolved before butterflies. Touch the delicate wings of a fallen moth, its glittery dust on your fingertip, and you touch 200 million years of time. You touch a creature that knew the dinosaurs. There are some 2,500 species of British moth. They come in nearly numberless variety of appearance, and some fly by day in preference to night,  the realm we consider they belong to. They come as a snow blizzard of micro-moths, speck-small, an eighth of an inch, in the car headlights on the lane, and they come as burnished brass (Diachrysia chrysitis), which due to light-reflecting scales does truly shine as bold as burnished brass. (The  pearlescent sheen is due to the arrangement of wing scales rather than pigment.)

Scientifically, the most consistent difference between butterflies and moths is that nearly all moths have a tiny hook-like structure joining the hind wing to the forewing, but butterflies do not. Most moths also have feathery antennae, as opposed to the club-ended prongs of butterflies, all the better to net the perfume of the nectar-emitting flowers of the night.

Over sixty types of moth became extinct in England in the twentieth century. We humans lose too; night-flying moths are more efficient pollinators than butterflies. Since 1968 the Rothamsted Insect Survey has monitored annual populations of large moths across England, Wales and Scotland, with a network of about one hundred light traps. In the thirty-five years to 2003, the annual total number of moths caught diminished by 31 per cent, with the greatest decrease in the southern half of the United Kingdom.

Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon 460 years ago this month. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust quite rightly asks for donations to ‘keep Shakespeare’s legacy alive.’  But surely without preserving the nature of England his plays lose their meaning? If there are no moths left to flutter to a flame, then the metaphor becomes as extinct as the insect.