Arched Hooktip and Common Spring Moth
On May 19, 2012 we accidentally left the garage door open, and the ceiling light turned on. This turned the whole garage into a giant light-trap for insects, and we caught a lot of them. I’ll be posting images from that night for some time. So let’s start with an easy one:
This very distinctive moth is an Arched Hooktip, Drepana arcuata. To ID it, all I had to do was riffle quickly through my new copy of the Peterson field guide to Moths of Northeastern North America[1] until I spotted it. There’s nothing else that looks quite like this moth. The larvae eat alder leaves (they are one of the caterpillars that roll up the leaves and take shelter inside), so it probably came from the tag alder stand out back.
Since I only had one good picture of the Arched Hooktip, I might as well throw in a second moth, that also came to the light that night, and that I also only have one picture of (it was sitting on the roof of the car directly under the light fixture, and I had a hard time getting a good angle for a shot):
Once again, this one was easily identifiable from the book: it looks to be the “Common Spring Moth”, Heliomata cycladata. These are, well, common in the spring, and are well-known for being attracted to lights. The larvae are inchworms that eat black locust (which is growing in a big clump off on the southeast corner of our front yard).
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[1] In normal conversation in the US, people are used to thinking of the “Northeast” as being New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. And maybe Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia if one stretches the point a bit. But in the case of “Moths of Northeastern North America”, “Northeast” means approximately “North of Georgia, and East of the Rockies” (which is about where the ecosystem actually changes enough that different species become dominant). So the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is well inside its coverage area, and the book is fully applicable to pretty much the entire Midwestern US, as well as Canada up to Hudson Bay and east to Newfoundland. It’s a good book, I recommend it.
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It looks like one of the planes you can fly in “Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe.” A flying wing of some sort. Of course, it’s fuzzy, cute, harmless and doesn’t want to bomb England, but other than that, the analogy is perfect!
I meant the Arched Hooktip with that comment. The Common Spring Moth is more a conventional He-111.
Ah, but they do bomb England! (or at least their relatives do!)
With tiny, tiny little bombs, that then hatch out and eat their oak trees.
I guess the analogy carries a bit further as the moths, like the Luftwaffe have a fly-until-you-die policy.