The Moth and the Flame

Like no other animals, moths bring to your doorstep the extreme and sublime diversity of life on Earth. So lose some sleep with them this summer.

A sampling of moths from my backyard in Montpelier, Vermont.

THEIR GIVEN NAMES evoke the breadth of the human experience, everything from virtue to betrayal, beauty to bird shit, the carnal to the spiritual: Splendid Dagger, Chocolate Prominent, Skunk Twirler, Abrupt Brother, Little Devil, Intractable Quaker, Beautiful Wood-Nymph, Owl-eyed Bird-Dropping, The Infant, The Hebrew, The Betrothed, The Drinker, The Penitent. These are but a tiny fraction of the moths that fly near you.

And yet beyond the drama they might invoke, beyond the whimsy of biologists who name them, moths offer us something even more profound: Like no other organisms, they bring nature’s shocking and incomprehensible diversity to our doorstep. By day and night, in the theater of our own backyards, moths embody a spectacle no less monumental than the story of life on Earth.