A Month of Many Moths

Three weeks or so ago an unusual looking moth arrived in our village. The moths arrived en masse and everyone noticed them. We talked with M, our neighbour, who wasn’t sure what they were and seemed to be suggesting, at least from the way she kept gesturing towards our Morning Glory flowers and the straw bale vegetable patch, that their appearance for the first time was somehow connected with our presence and our strange new ways.

One of the thousands (millions?) of Box Tree Moths that have taken over the village

I searched online and didn’t find anything. The next day M told us that she’d heard about them on the news as their arrival was something of a local phenomenon. The species was the Pyral de Buis (Box Tree Moth or Cydalima perspectalis), an invasive species that arrived in Europe via Germany in 2006, reaching France in 2009. Originally from China, it’s preferred food is box wood, on which it lays its eggs before the caterpillars hatch and duly decimate it.

For the first few days we enjoyed the spectacle, especially when, on about day three, an enormous flock of swallows also arrived, eating them on the wing. We would stand on the balcony and give the fence a shake, which would cause a huge cloud of them to take to the air, at which point the swallows would move in, chasing and swooping, picking the out of the air. Here’s a short video I shot on my phone.

​But the novelty has worn off. They are everywhere: in the house, on virtually every leaf, and busy on the figs. They seem to be here for the fruit, with the moths gathering to feed on the figs to the extent that they are crowding out the wasps who usually feast on them! Having read up a bit about them online there’s not much that can be done. There’s a pheromone trap that attracts the males but they’re expensive to buy. Our other neighbour, P, is so sick of them he’s been setting a light trap at night, content simply to reduce their numbers by a few hundred at a time. Not that it makes any difference because they’re everywhere, dead and alive; in the car, the house, in the plants, the washing – basically anything outside. The moths have basically taken over the place! Even the birds can’t keep up, visiting every three days or so, taking their fill then disappearing for a while, possibly to sleep off their feast!

While having a little potter round the village with DS I noticed they were also eating the grapes and asked another neighbour about their impact on the wine harvest, but he said something about pesticides and suggested they weren’t a problem! There isn’t any box wood in the immediate vicinity of here but there is a lot of it around so I would imagine it was being decimated as the only way to rid the plant of the caterpillars is to drench the plant repeatedly with pesticide and no-ones going to be doing that on the necessary scale anytime soon. Nice.

So there’s that.

Another new (to me) moth is this one, which I found sitting on the road.

When I moved it to a safer place it opened its wings slightly to reveal the stunning red hindwings. I’ve not seen one before or since so I am glad I got to photograph and identify it. It’s a tiger moth (Arctia caja)! I do think the name is a bit weird because it’s markings are more giraffe-like than tiger-like but hey. I can’t believe I’ve never seen one before, even though they’re listed as common in the UK. Beautiful!

There are other creatures I’ve not seen before around but my phone keeps running out of memory so I’ve not managed to get photos, which make identification after the fact a bit difficult. The only other one I can definitely remember is the Slender Scotch Burnet (Zygaena loti), which some of the kids at the school were “playing” with when we were there the other evening. Unfortunately, one of its hindwings was broken and kids being kids they weren’t all that gentle with it. What was nice was that they were really examining it closely, as well as having made a “home” for it out of sticks, twigs, leaves and petals. In the UK this is a priority species listed in the Red Book. I hope they don’t have the same status here in France because the kids really weren’t interested in its conservation value!