Pug Moth
Here’s yet another moth from our porch light on May 18, 2015. All my pictures of it turned out to be from the same angle, but this one does seem to show pretty much all the details one would reasonably expect to be able to see in a picture. Especially considering that the actual moth had a total wingspan of around 3/4 inch, and so (depending on how big your screen is) this picture is pretty close to 20 times actual size.
That pose is very characteristic of the Pug Moths in the genus Eupithecia. This is an extremely diverse genus of geometrid moths. BugGuide says that it is the most speciose known genus of moths by a large margin, with 1400 species known worldwide, at least 162 species in North America north of Mexico, and at least 62 known all the way up in Canada. And looking through the pages and pages of specimens of this genus on BugGuide, I can say that my specimen looks plausibly similar to most of them, but appears to be an exact match for none of them.
The larvae are little inchworms that mostly feed on plants in the Aster family, which I am told is possibly the family of flowering plants with the greatest number of species. Do I think there is a connection between there being so many different species of these moths, and there being so many different species in their preferred family of food plants? Yes, I do. It would not surprise me at all if it turned out that practically every plant genus in the Asteraceae had their own species of Eupithecia that prefers to eat it.
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Nice shot. Have you seen the Death’s-head Hawkmoth? It resembles a human face…