The Moths Are Back

I really don't like moths. Never have.

I mentioned this to my husband when we were out on our first date (because there was one climbing on the window behind him in the restaurant) and he thought this very amusing. Years ago he was given the nickname "The Moth" because of his habit of tapping on the windows of friends' houses with their lights on after dark.

Very cute I'm sure, but not enough to cure my life-long dislike of those furry unpredictable stalkers.

They are stalkers because they follow the light, and usually that's where I'm headed as well. And they are unpredictable. Flying around all over the place. You never know where they are going. And they are furry. I hate that.

Some really yucky moth incident must have happened to me when I was a child. Maybe I swallowed one by accident. I've blocked it out so I don't have to relive that trauma, but the fear of it happening again remains.

And now it's back.

Alarmingly we have been living in a flat for almost three years now, that holds some kind of attraction for the yuckiest moth of them all - the Bogong.

Bogongs usually live way out west of Sydney but when it starts getting too hot out there - right about now at the beginning of spring - they migrate to the mountains, where it's cooler and they hang out in caves til the heat goes away.

The Aborigines used to find them in the caves and knew they were a delicious summertime snack. Very nutritious too.

Well I wish someone or something was eating them now. Cos some of them get blown off course and instead of ending up looking for a nice mountain-top cave in the Great Dividing Range, they are walking all over my balcony on the 12th floor of an inner-city apartment.

And it gets worse. Someone stuffed up when they were fitting the sliding doors in the aparments on this building ... there are gaps at the top and bottom of the sliding part. The doors aren't air-tight - or even moth-tight. Yes, that's right, the horrible furry bastards can crawl into my living room, and bedroom, right through the doors. Yeah.

The first year we were here was a bad moth season - it starts in October. I didn't know about the doors then, so couldn't figure out where the hell all these moths were coming from. One day I came home and found about a dozen flying around. Nearly had a heart attack. I pulled out the vacuum cleaner and sucked them all up, then put the vac away in the cupboard. About an hour later I saw them crawling out under the door of the cupboard. Another heart attack. The vacuum spent the next week sitting out on the balcony.

Finally I spoke to the building manager about it and he told me to stuff paper towels in the gaps in the doors. Now this I am happy to do - except I know there are other people in the building who won't know any of this moth stuff. So there was a moth in here last night, because it came through from another apartment. It's dreadful really. I'm glad I don't own the place. The building manager told me it's worse for the apartments on our side of the building because of the direction the moths are coming from. Terrific.

I'm not the only person in Sydney who can't stand them. Bogongs get blamed for all kinds of bad stuff. When they come into the cities they are a "plague". They are a pest because they eat cauliflower. One of them supposedly landed on the breast of the woman singing the anthem at the Sydney Olympics - but moth specialists say it wasn't actually a bogong. Too bad, the rest of us prefer to think it was.

The Bogong (Agrotis infusa) is almost completely brown and quite big for a moth - about the size of a 20 cent piece, sometimes bigger. This is a good website http://linus.socs.uts.edu.au/~don/larvae/noct/infusa.html

Although why people want to actually spend time studying these things .. I don't know.

I read somewhere else that Australia has about 20,000 different kinds of moths and only about half have been given official scientific names. Doesn't surprise me! Although it would be a great fundraising opportunity for some smart university - charge people money to have a moth named after them.

No thanks.