Photo of the Week

National Moth Week ended yesterday. The weather cleared up towards the end of last week, so I was able to put in an evening of mothing on Wednesday night. I hope any readers that wanted to were able to get to a mothing event or do one on their own. If you missed it, well, moths are present year-round in many places, and there is still time this summer to set up a outdoor light for an evening. Many of the organizations that accepted data from National Moth Week events also accept data year-round.

Because moths are such a large group, interested amateurs can contribute useful information. Take the moth above, the Deep Yellow Euchlaenia (Euchlaena amoenaria). This moth is fairly common and widespread through eastern North America, as one can see from the map at the Moth Photographers Group. Despite this, it seems that its larval host plant is still unknown, and there are no images of caterpillars for this species at either BugGuide or MPG. Many other species lack complete range information.

Even though this is a common and widespread moth, I was excited to see this land on my sheet last Wednesday since it was a new species for me.

Loose Feathers #402

Common Tern and chicks / USFWS Photo

Birds and birding

• The US Fish and Wildlife Service plans to kill 3,603 Barred Owls at four study locations in the Pacific Northwest to see if removing Barred Owls will help the Northern Spotted Owl population recover. Barred Owls have occupied the Northern Spotted Owl's range as the latter's population declined and crashed.
• The New Yorker has a long article on obsessive egg collectors and the British conservationists that try to catch them. The police and the RSPB have cooperated on a program called Operation Easter that monitors known collectors and runs regular sting operations.
• The wood rail at Bosque del Apache in New Mexico has drawn a lot of birders from around the country.
• The development of the environmental movement is closely tied to the popularization of birdwatching.
• The situation for migratory birds in the Mediterranean region is quite dire, especially in Egypt.
• Some British gulls became disoriented after eating flying ants because the ants contain formic acid.
• A puffin survey in the Farne Islands showed that the breeding population there is recovering from its crash in 2008.
• A new study suggests that homing pigeons navigate with an internal map.
• An eye-tracking study found that peahens watch the width of a peacock's train and how he shakes his feathers but pay less attention to the eyespots during courtship displays. 
• A couple thousand galahs and cockatoos flocked to a town in Queensland because of a drought and caused some blackouts.

Science and nature blogging

• Bruce Byers Consulting: Colorado Fires and Firemoths
• BunyipCo: National Moth Week
• Not Exactly Rocket Science: How Loyalty Paints a Meadow
• Audubon Guides: Species Spotlight: Luna Moth
• 10,000 Birds: The Mousebird Mystery
• Birding Is Fun!: A Rare Bird Comes to New Mexico
• Bird Ecology Study Group: Save MacRitchie Forest: 13. Butterflies, jewels of the forest
• Compound Eye: An interview with Bug Dreams’ Rick Lieder
• Net Results: Update on catbird research
• Anything Larus: Another Lesson in Angle-to-Observer
• Outside My Window: These Are Not Pine Cones
• Tetrapod Zoology: It’s hot and sunny, so birds lie down and sunbathe

Environment and biodiversity

• Honey bees in agricultural settings are exposed to a diverse array of pesticides and fungicides, and bees exposed to high levels of fungicides are more likely to be infected by the parasite Nosema ceranae. Read the study in PLoS ONE.
• Louisiana is suing energy companies for the loss of its coastal wetlands, which were harmed by the building of pipelines and canals.
• A tar sands mining operation in Alberta has been spilling bitumen into wetlands for at least sex weeks, and it is not clear whether the mining company will be able to stop it.
• Alaska is seeing more wildfires due to climate change, and the frequent fires are changing the composition of the boreal forest.
• A DC court found "actual malice" in false accusations against climate scientist Michael Mann, which means that his defamation lawsuit against the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute will proceed.
• Dams are coming down in New England to make way for salmon and other migratory fish. The Veazie Dam on the Penobscot River in Maine was breached this week; the Whittenton Dam in Massachusetts is also being removed, partly for safety reasons.
• In New Jersey, the Nevius Street Dam on the Raritan River near Duke Farms will also be removed to aid fish migration.
• Female Heliconius butterflies have taste sensors in their feet that help them locate the proper host plant to lay eggs.
• Last weekend was the start of Britain's Big Butterfly Count. Observers hope to find Purple Emperors and other rare species.
• The new administrator of the EPA promises to address climate change.
• Western conservationists are using controlled burns to reshape the landscape and prevent catastrophic wildfires.
• Sandy Hook is using goats to clear poison ivy off of a historic structure.
• This Sunday, the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission is holding a Butterfly Day at DeKorte Park.
• New Jersey is currently generating more solar energy per capita than California.

Books and Web Resources on Moths

This week is National Moth Week. Why moths? Moths are extremely diverse, with about 160,000 species worldwide, and appear in a variety of sizes, shapes, and colors. Despite this incredible diversity, many moths are not well studied or are underappreciated; sometimes they are even feared. National Moth Week aims to give more attention to these creatures of the night and to encourage citizen scientists to study and document them.

One obstacle to starting out studying moths as an amateur is that they are not as well covered as birds or even butterflies when it comes to field guides and other references for a popular audience. Moths' diversity makes it difficult for any guide to include all of the possible species, even within a limited area like northeastern North America. Here are some useful books on moths in North America.

The Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America by David Beadle and Seabrooke Leckie is currently the best field guide for moths in its area. It covers macromoths pretty thoroughly and includes many of the more common micromoths. The photos are of living specimens. I reviewed this book here.

Charles Covell's Field Guide to Moths of Eastern North America has effectively been replaced by the previous guide though it covers a larger area. It uses spread-winged specimens, and some printings have black and white illustrations. The guide has been out of print for a long time, but a reprint is available from the Virginia Museum of Natural History.

Caterpillars of Eastern North America by David Wagner covers common caterpillars of both moths and butterflies. This is a useful starting point for learning about caterpillars.

Owlet Caterpillars of Eastern North America by David Wagner, Dale Schweitzer, J. Bolling Sullivan, Richard Reardon provides thorough coverage of caterpillars from the superfamily Noctuoidea. This is primarily for people who already have a pretty deep interest in moths. I reviewed it here.

Moths & Caterpillars of the North Woods by Jim Sogaard has limited coverage, but I found it useful when I was first learning moths.

Le guide des papillons du Québec – Version scientifique by Louis Handfield is a two-volume French language guide for northeastern North America.

Moths of Western North America by Jerry Powell and Paul Opler covers the western region.

Discovering Moths: Nighttime Jewels in Your Own Backyard by John Himmelman is not a field guide but a popular introduction to moths. It covers how to find and study moths, some aspects of moth biology, interesting lepidopterists, and moths in mythology and popular culture.

Tiger Moths and Woolly Bears: Behavior, Ecology, and Evolution of the Arctiidae, edited by William Conner, is a collection of articles on tiger moth biology.

The Moth Book: A Popular Guide to a Knowledge of the Moths of North America by W.J. Holland is available as a free download from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which hosts a number of older books on Lepidoptera. It is also available from Google Books. The taxonomy is out of date, but it still may be a useful resource.

Because the books available can only cover so much, web resources are essential for confirming identifications and learning more about moths. Here are a few useful ones.

The Moth Photographers Group is probably the single most useful website for studying North American moths. Its plate series has thousands of high quality images, with multiple images for each species, including micromoths. It also provides links to much more information. Before the publication of Beadle and Leckie's guide, this was my main resource for identifying moths, and even now I still use it regularly.

BugGuide maintains guide pages for insects with reference images and text; users may submit photos for identification. The coverage is more uneven than at the Moth Photographers Group.

Pacific Northwest Moths covers 1,200 species of moths with species accounts and an interactive key for identification.

Butterflies and Moths of North America has species profiles and checklists.

Lepidoptera Barcode of Life is building a DNA barcode library of positively identified moth specimens. Images of moths in their database can be viewed on their website. Mark Dreiling is a major contributor of specimens.

National Moth Week has instructions for finding moths and links to many other resources, including where to submit data for moth observations.

Discover Life has a simple moth protocol for obtaining more useful data.

Finally, for those in my home county, Todd Dreyer has created a collection of beautiful photographs of moths in Middlesex County, New Jersey.

Photo of the Week

This week is National Moth Week. The vast majority of moths fly at night and have special adaptations for a nocturnal lifestyle. They navigate using the stars and moon, find each other with pheromones rather than visual displays, have cryptic patterns for hiding during the day, and can shiver to warm themselves on cooler nights. Some moths even have the ability to hear and jam bat sonar.

However, a select few moths fly during daylight hours. Such moths are often brightly colored and might be mistaken for butterflies, bees, or other insects that we are used to seeing during the day. Among these diurnal moths are the hummingbird sphinx moths in genus Hemaris, family Sphingidae, such as the Snowberry Clearwing pictured above. Like the Hummingbird Clearwing, also in genus Hemaris, its flight is reminiscent of a hummingbird's. Aided by its long proboscis, it feeds on deeply tubular flowers such as the wild bergamot in the photo above. The strongly contrasting yellow and black markings visually suggest those of a bumblebee. When I was photographing this Snowberry Clearwing, I had some trouble keeping track of which yellow-and-black insects were clearwings and which were bumblebees. Snowberry Clearwing moths use snowberry, honeysuckle, and dogbane as larval hosts.

I photographed this Snowberry Clearwing yesterday at Negri-Nepote Grassland Preserve during a Birds and Butterflies walk led by Chris and Paula Williams of NJ Audubon. As of my writing this, thunderstorms are predicted for every night this week, so I am not sure whether I will be able to put out my blacklight.

Loose Feathers #401

Gull-billed tern at Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge / Photo by R. Baak (USFWS)

Birds and birding

• Dead waterbirds are being found around industrial-scale solar energy installations in the California desert. These include ducks, grebes, and rails, as well as songbirds associated with wetland habitats. As the birds migrate over the desert, they may see the sun reflecting off the solar panels or mirrors and mistake them for a body of water. Great Blue Herons are among the casualties.
• The farm bill standoff is holding up funding for the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to maintain habitat for grassland birds.
• Artificial rafts covered in vegetation are rebuilding the breeding population of Black-throated Divers (a.k.a. Arctic Loon) in Scotland.
• Wild chili pepper seeds that pass through the gut of a Small-billed Elaenia are more likely to germinate and grow into plants.
• A team of conservationists has completed its eradication of feral rodents from South Georgia. The goal of the program was to improve the survival rate of the island's breeding birds, included the endemic South Georgia Pipit and South Georgia Pintail.
• The Ground Tit (Parus humilis) can survive in the harsh Tibetan plateau thanks to genetic adaptations for low-oxygen and cold environments.
• This year's survey of Atlantic Puffins in the Farne Islands found that their population is recovering from a recent crash.
• Some polyandrous shorebirds select mates on the basis of physical attributes rather than brain size; this may be because body size evolves faster than brain size in these species.
• A study suggests that bird and mammal brains have similar structures and connections.

Science and nature blogging

• ABA Blog: The evolution of county listing 
• 10,000 Birds: Black-throated Sparrow at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area 
• The Net Naturalist: Playful Post – Wildlife Inspired Insults
• Beetles in the Bush: “Rare jewel beetles discovered in Mexico by team of scientists!”
• Bird Ecology Study Group: Save MacRitchie Forest: 13. Butterflies, jewels of the forest

Environment and biodiversity

• National Moth Week starts tomorrow, July 20, and runs through July 28.  Follow the link to find an event near you or learn how to participate yourself. Here is an article on the East Brunswick group that helped get NMW started. Here is another article on the East Brunswick group.
• The Carpenter 1 Fire in Nevada threatens to wipe out the remaining populations of several rare species, including a rare chipmunk and a rare butterfly, the Mount Charleston Blue. (Audio interview with biologists here.)
• A new species of moth was discovered in China. You can read the open-access journal article describing the species (and see more photos of it) here.
• Another new moth species was found in Iran and likewise was published in Zookeys.
• Oregon rewrote its rules on when wolves may be killed by finding a compromise position between conservationists and ranchers.
• In the last ten years, the population of the endangered Iberian Lynx has tripled thanks to conservation efforts.
• A Western Bumblebee (Bombus occidentalis) was spotted in Seattle for the first time since the 1990s.
• Two groups of scientists are trying to restore the American Chestnut as a common tree in eastern forests, one through hybridization and the other through genetic modification.
• Climate change is putting low-lying historic sites at risk.
• Around 300 stingrays turned up dead on a beach in Veracruz, Mexico.
• The US Senate finally confirmed Gina McCarthy to head the EPA. 
• Here is a profile of a South African lepidopterist who searches for (and sometimes finds) rare butterflies.