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In 2016 I’m doing a 365 Nature project. Learn more about the project and see all the 365 Nature posts.


I awoke to a blissfully cloudy sky this morning and was it a relief after the last few days of record-breaking heat. The sun rose and I didn’t have to close all the curtains on the east side of the house for a change. When I opened the front door, another nice treat greeted me, a moth. One of the first I’ve seen in quite awhile. When we had an electrical upgrade last year we put in new porch lights with LED bulbs. Since then we’ve had almost no moths compared to previous years when I’d have a regular stream to our lights. I never got around to using the de-zapped bug light this summer either because of a new door that now prevents my running an extension cord through it to power the light. Next spring, my goal will be to get more moth lights setup.

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Kelly Brenner

Kelly Brenner

Kelly Brenner is a naturalist, writer and artist based in Seattle. She is the author of THE NATURALIST AT HOME: Projects for Discovering the Hidden World Around Us and NATURE OBSCURA: A City’s Hidden Natural World from Mountaineers Books, a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and Pacific Northwest Book Awards. She writes articles about natural history and has bylines in Crosscut, Popular Science, National Wildlife Magazine and others. On the side she writes fiction.

2 Comments

  • Eileen Stark says:

    Are you saying you purposely leave lights on to attract moths? Urban artificial lights are a major threat to moth and other populations.

  • We leave our porch lights on for safety and all of our new porch lights are dark sky approved lights. Before we upgraded the lights, the old ones attracted moths, a few each week. During the summer I do put out moth traps or lights once in awhile to document the moths we have in this area and I try to submit them to various citizen science projects. I also participate most years in National Moth Week http://nationalmothweek.org/ by exploring the moth diversity that visits our yard.

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