As the sun sets on a swelteringly hot summer evening, darkness descends, bringing with it some sweet relief from the heat along with the sounds of nocturnal insects.
In a small brown building set along the edge of a marshy area, a group of around 60 adults filter out into the darkness. Some wear small headlights strapped to hats, others carry flashlights and cameras with long lenses, as they fan out into the darkness around the building.
This is the tenth annual Moth Night at Cedar Bog — a unique marshy area that was formed when the glaciers retreated. It's home to some of Ohio’s rarest specimens of flora and fauna.
Rose Pelzl is bending down examining a plant in the beam of her headlamp.
“I’m looking at this, I think she called it a looper? It’s a caterpillar and it’s taken the flowers which it is eating right now which is a yarrow, and it’s attached it all over its body to camouflage it as a yarrow, as a flower, so that it doesn’t get eaten and it’s so cute,” Pezel said.
Pezel is just getting into mothing. She has a property in Yellow Springs where she’s incorporating regenerative farming practices and learning how the natural world intersects and connects.
There are five stations set up around the nature center building with different kinds of lights to attract moths and other nocturnal insects.
Judy Lundquist brought her own mothing set up. The light inside the small 3 foot by 4 foot tent attracts small moths and other nocturnal creatures to land on the tent fabric.
Lundquist got hooked on mothing last year when she and her husband came to an event and they traveled up from Kentucky this year to experience it again.
“I’m into birding and love dragonflies so this is just a natural progression, I’m just a curious person and they are fascinating,” Lundquist said while adjusting the light in the tent.
Out in the darkness Craig Biegler’s headlamp illuminates a long, skinny brown caterpillar gyrating on the stem of a plant.
“It’s a big caterpillar right there. I don’t know what species it is, it’s one of the Geometridae inchworm moths. It’s a pretty good stick mimic,” Biegler said, while photographing the insect.
Around him a few big sphinx moths fly around milkweed flowers, darting in and out of the beam of his headlamp.
Beigler got excited about moths and caterpillars about 20 years ago when he saw a Hickory Horned Devil Caterpillars.
"And for me, it’s heartbreaking that in a nature preserve, that we’re seeing this significant decline in numbers and also in diversity."
“It's about 5 inches long, and they’re turquoise with orange horns, and they look like a little dragon. And I just had to learn everything I could about them, and I’ve been learning about them ever since,” Beigler recalled.
Beigler is a naturalist with the Columbus Metro Parks, which has their own moth night, staying up late to catch a glimpse of the bigger moths, like the luna.
But, at Cedar Bog's moth night in June, the moths seemed to be mostly MIA.
“It’s difficult to think about, ten years ago we put the lights out and we had an incredible number of moths and other insects. And each year it seems like we have fewer and fewer come to our lights,” said Jim Lemon, a volunteer naturalist at Cedar Bog.
"And for me, it’s heartbreaking that in a nature preserve, that we’re seeing this significant decline in numbers and also in diversity."
Lemon said that they are trying to decide if the moths are just in a lull and they will come back, or if this is a more long term trend.
Moths can be maligned by many people. But, despite their bad rap for some moth species chewing holes in clothes, they’re an important food source for songbirds, mammals, and other insects.
And they also work as pollinators, particularly those that are active after dark, when many other pollinating animals have settled down for the night.
So although they are small, moths play a large role in the environment, and without them part of the natural food web starts to collapse, leading to a domino effect with other species and mammals who rely on them as a food source or for pollination.
"We may be seeing changes that are happening faster than our organisms can respond."
“I wish we had good answers for what is going on,” Lemon said. “Obviously our temperatures are increasing. The planet has experienced significant temperature changes in the past. But usually they are over very long periods of time, thousands of years, tens of thousands of years.”
He explained that life will respond to the stimuli presented and if the plant community is changing and moving north as a response to warming temperatures, and the insects and animals can’t respond to that same transition then they become extirpated - they are gone from this part of the world.
“It may be that we are presenting them with a challenge that is unprecedented,” Lemon said.
"We may be seeing changes that are happening faster than our organisms can respond."
Lemon also said some federal and state money to fund environmental research projects has dried up.
“So we do things like mothing to keep us in perspective of what is actually going on and so that we can document that and monitor the change thru time,” Lemon said. “The hope would be that even with temperature change, even with I hate to say, all the horrible things that humans do to our environment, if you think about heavy metals and pesticides and plastics and all of it.”
Lemon said that individually some moth species may be able to sustain part of that, but collectively he thinks what’s happening globally might just be a huge challenge for everything, including us.
For those who want to learn more about moths and how to protect them in our state, Ohio naturalist Jim McCormac has co-written a book with Chelsea Gottfried called Gardening For Moths: A Regional Guide.
