Brown Tortricid Moth with Triangular White Marks on Wings
Here’s a small brown moth that was at our porch light on June 25, 2019.
It looks like a Tortricid moth. This is a large family of smallish moths that mostly seem to have caterpillars that are “leaf-rollers”, rolling themselves up in a leaf like a burrito so that they will be protected while they eat it.
I’m not having much luck getting an ID on this one, though. There are a lot of these moths, and slogging through BugGuide looking for a specific one of them takes a long time. I did find one that was basically a negative image of my moth here (white, with triangular brown spots on the wings), but that’s clearly not the right one.
Since I wasn’t having any luck, I posted it to BugGuide for ID. And, just now, Aaron Hunt says it is a White Triangle Tortrix, Clepsis persicana. Their caterpillars have been found eating the leaves of at least 40 different types of trees and shrubs, “including alder, peach, apple, birch, Douglas-fir, fir, Eastern Hemlock, maple, pine, spruce, Tamarack, willow”, as the page says. That is an unusually broad range of host plants, considering that some of them are broad-leaved deciduous trees, while others are evergreen conifers. You don’t normally see insects that feed on both deciduous trees and evergreens. The BugGuide page also has an interesting bit of trivia: these moths received the species name “persicana” because the first specimen described was found as a caterpillar, eating peach leaves. But, since then, it has apparently never been reported as eating peach leaves again!
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I don’t see how anyone can take this moth seriously with those eyes.
I suppose moths are used to not being taken seriously.
Well, that explains the poor performance of my stock portfolio …