The weirdest moth in England

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/16/country-diary-weirdest-moth-england

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I knew they lived in the parish but I’d only seen them from a distance six years ago. There had been no formal introduction, as it were, but today we met properly for the first time; on the lane down to the marsh where the dog walkers go.

The surroundings were modest for June: a green light so dark and immersive it felt like liquid. On one side were the silver heads of false oat grass. On the other was a shelf of fresh bramble backed by a wall of hawthorn, and over and through all that green shadow a blackbird soloed to the morning.

The yellow-barred longhorn has to be one of the weirdest moths in England. It is a common and widespread insect but, judging from my own experience, easily overlooked or mistaken for something mundane. When they were flying over the hawthorn tops they were no more than dark flies, dancing and skittering in motion but otherwise lacking any kind of attention-requiring detail.

Then they would descend, glancing around me in a restless random pattern reminiscent of a gnat swarm. There were about a dozen. All males. They gravitated to a sliver of sunlight through the trees and were essentially pale glinting brown.

What was most impressive were the long threads of what looked like limbs wafting as they moved. But those “longhorns” are actually antennae four times their owner’s body length. The tension generated by flight bent the glistening threads to either side and above their passage, so that it looked as if they bobbed up and down on a child’s swing of their own making.

Occasionally a yellow-barred longhorn would land. Then, the featureless insect above the hawthorn or the brown glancing fly looping in its homemade swing became a flake of gold attached to two wind-brushed blond hairs.

Almost at every step in this season something remarkable makes our acquaintance. Perhaps it is because as I get older I walk slower and have more encounters of this kind. Maybe it is the years also that make such moments more moving and important.