Who’s Out There? Opening a Pandora’s Moth

As the morning sun poured through the Ponderosa Pines, I spotted a creature that looked like a fairy as the sun shone through it’s delicate wings, and it glided around looking for a safe place to land.

I was back in the dry forest of Bend Oregon, and I’d been seeing these beautiful moth like critters about the size of the palm of my hand. The ones I’d found so far were dead on the ground.

The one that I’d just seen flittering was now crawling on the pine needle covered forest floor, moving as fast as his little legs would take him, his wings being useless at this point. I wanted to help him, but I didn’t know what he was looking for. He must’ve needed food, or he’d be flying, but what did he eat?

I kept anxiously watching him, hoping he didn’t endure the fate of the other moths I’d seen.

He crawled up the stump of a tree and crawled around and quickly found it didn’t go very far. So he dragged himself across the bumpy sticky pine needles and found another full length tree. His fluttering wings sounding like a taxiing propeller on a small Cessna airplane. He adeptly crawled up it’s side and came to a branch. He rested there for a while. It was like he was being guided or called. He was so small how did he know where to go? He crawled out the 2 inch diameter branch until he found a smaller branch about the size of my pinky finger. There he wrapped his bark colored wings around his furry body and stayed.

Maybe the other moths hadn’t found their branch bed in time and fell to their death on the forest floor.

I couldn’t wait until I got back into reception so I could research more about these beauties.

As the morning sun turned into afternoon fire, the little moths kept coming, flying around tree after tree looking for something. What? And then so many just started falling off the sides of the trees, their wings jagged like torn paper, half the size they were at their earthy beauty. The dead ones I found had lost that spatula antennae, it had shriveled to just a thin sliver.

I kept helping the ones I found struggling to get up a tree with a discarded piece of bark. They eagerly crawled on it, over and over again, and up my arm, trying to get somewhere. I so desperately wanted to know where.

One by one, all the ones who I thought I’d rescued, who’d I thought I saved from certain death, fell off the bull ward bark and curled into the fetal position as if to save themselves from death’s last tolls.

Then I started noticing that some had coupled up! I should’ve known they were looking for a mate!

Turns out I was getting to witness an event that only happens every 4 to 8 years. These Pandora moths come out, mate, and plant their eggs in the trees’ bark. Then in 4 years, the larvae will hatch, crawl up to the pine needles and eat them until it’s time for them to transform into moths!

The next day I looked at the perch of the first moth I’d seen, and I noticed something. It wasn’t just him wrapped around that twig, he or she had attracted a friend.

I don’t know how long the moth unearthing had been going on, but I only got to see them that one morning. The next day, I saw only one.

I missed the fairy-like moths flittering about in the sun, but I guess they’ll be back in 8 years to do it again!