Nothing heralds the arrival of June in Colorado quite like that highly anticipated moment – it generally occurs as you’re merging onto the interstate with a cup of coffee in one hand – when you pull down your car’s sun visor and a pair of miller moths explode from the dark crevasse. And nothing so marks the joy of this warm season as clenching the steering wheel and watching in delight as the playful moths seek out another dark and safe place to rest. Such as inside your nose or ears.
And so the marvelous annual migration has begun, millions of the small, powdery winged visitors from Nebraska and Kansas making their pilgrimage to Colorado to feast upon the nectar of the mountain wildflowers, pausing frequently along the way to come inside our homes and hide inside our cereal boxes. Until the nighttime, when they emerge and fly around the house, fulfilling their powerful biological need to entertain our cats.
Colorado State University entomologist Whitney Cranshaw, who tracks the miller moth invasion each year, believes 2006 will be unusual.
“I believe this will be an oasis year for the miller moths,” he said, indicating that, because of drought conditions across Colorado, the moths will seek out areas of irrigated landscape.
Agricultural land.
And places with heavily watered lawns and outdoor flowers.
“They will,” Cranshaw said, “be attracted to our homes.”
(To which many Coloradans shout an excited “yippee!” Followed by rolling up the Sunday Denver Post and practicing their swatting techniques.)
But today we bring you good news on the miller moth front: It could be worse.
Safer under glass
John May, owner and curator of the May Natural History Museum on Colorado 115 between Colorado Springs and Cañon City, knows it could be much, much worse.
Imagine, for example, pulling down the car’s sun visor and having an Atlas moth with a staggering 10-inch wingspan and eyes the size of pencil erasers suddenly swoop toward your nose. As you might imagine, you’d not likely be finishing that morning commute cup of coffee. The eye-popping Atlas – think of a moth the size of a blue jay – is one of some 7,000 dead and mounted specimens from the insect world on display at May’s museum.
“I cannot imagine,” said May, who is 89 and whose father, James May, began the entomology collection in 1903, “why anyone would be bothered by the little miller moths.”
On an ensuing 90-minute tour of his museum, he points out with great glee insects that would have you much more concerned.
In an aisle of beetles, the specimens are extremely dead and sealed inside heavy glass cases, two facts that make a visitor feel a bit foolish for shuffling backward at a rather brisk pace.
“The Colombian beetle,” May said, pointing toward a massive, 9-inch beetle with a pair of 3-inch pincers, “is a real giant.”
He is asked how much a living Colombian beetle might weigh.
“If he’s flying, it depends on where he hits you,” May said, with a grin. “If he gets you at full speed on the forehead, it would feel like a ton.
“They can,” he said, “put you on your back.”
And then it’s off to perhaps his favorite aisles, the aisles of butterflies and moths, many hundreds of them, the butterflies in radiant colors and the moths generally in drab browns and grays.
A favorite of May’s is cocytius tigina, the Giant Sphinx moth of South America. It has an 8-inch wingspan and can fly at breathtaking speeds.
“They are,” he said, “like aircraft.”
Nightmare moths
He paused then at the next set of glass cases containing dozens of members of the Atlas moth family, all with one chilling characteristic: the tips of their gigantic wings are shaped and colored to look like the heads of snakes.
“When they hide with their wings spread out,” May said, “the wings look exactly like the poisonous snakes of the jungle they inhabit. That coloration wards off enemies that might otherwise eat them.”
And then he tells of how his father collected some of these moths.
“Alcohol,” May said. “You combine any strong alcohol, like whiskey, with mashed bananas. The smell attracts them. They feed on the mash, and they get drunk and you merely pick them up.”
And so the dusty miller moths of Nebraska and Kansas are coming. Entomologist Cranshaw said the first serious wave should arrive by today. They will be gone within a month. And if the visit by the 1-inch gray moths bothers you, take solace in this:
If you lived in South America, you could at this moment be under attack from a swarm of gigantic drunken moths with poisonous snakes painted on their wings.
Although watching them chase the cat would be fun.
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
