Day: May 30, 2024

Okay, that probably made no sense.

Here’s the scoop. 

I had the sliding door open a little too long into an evening over the Memorial Day holiday. It was a coolish night and I didn’t think the moths were out & about yet.

I also had the front windows open. I was doing stuff in the house and didn’t close the slider or the windows until well after twilight. There were a few moths flittering around but all seemed normal. I went to bed.

I was awakened later in the night by a moth that was trying to fly through the glass door in the master bedroom. The creature was trying for all the world to get to an LED light on the rail of the deck. Grrr.

The next night, was a bit cooler, I closed the front windows earlier in the evening. At some point I heard this weird sound. I followed it to the front window and there, trapped between the screen and the glass was more moths than I could count. The screen was literally alive with them. The other window in the front of the house also had a ton of moths. 

They were contained, so I didn’t think too much about them. The next morning, they were all gone. I though they’d worked their way through the gap in between the screen and the frame. 

I was wrong, they came back the next night. I couldn’t imagine why they’d returned.

Turns out they hadn’t returned, they’d been hiding in the screen and window frame, How so many fit in such small spaces is beyond me but somehow they’d done it. I discovered this when I decided to clean the screen. As I pulled the screen out of the window frame it was “Moth-Ageddon”. 

Standing there swarmed by moths, I wondered if this was the beginning of my becoming a MothMan of the west. Since the Window was open to the sky, I thought the moths would fly out. They didn’t, they doubled back into the house, every nook & cranny now had moths in it.

I finished cleaning the screen, then removed the creatures I could see, and waited for dusk. 

As darkness fell, moths began migrating toward the windows. I’d purposely kept the lights off in an attempt to corral them. Then it was vacuum time!

2 hours later, the house was apparently clear. I increased the brightness of lights and discovered I’d missed at least 75 moths all of which were now flitting toward the lamps. The vacuum dispatched these as well. There was a satisfying “thump” as each moth got sucked into the vacuum hose.

By 11PM I called myself the winner. 

At some point, I was thinking of the old Godzilla movies where Mothra and Godzilla duked it out. Now, I have a hankering to watch those movies and I’m also considering purchasing a large iguana.

If I were to have another battle like last night, I fear even the largest iguana wouldn’t have been able to keep up. The poor thing would be lying on the floor with its stomach too full to move.