Opening the moth trap

Text 1: What the Night Delivered, by Ben Aldous

An original contemporary blog.

The moth trap sits at the bottom of the garden all night, a plastic bucket with a bulb on top, blazing away like a tiny lighthouse while the rest of the street sleeps. In the morning, before the sun gets to it, I carry it inside like a bomb disposal officer and set it on the kitchen table. Then I make a cup of tea. You do not rush the moth trap.

Inside are egg boxes, stacked loosely, and on the egg boxes, in every crevice and hollow, are the moths. Last night there were sixty-three of them. To the casual eye, I admit, most moths look like small brown triangles of dust, and the casual eye is partly right. But lift one egg box out into the light and look closely, and the brown begins to break apart into a hundred browns: chestnut and cinnamon and toffee and bark, mottled, freckled, banded, laced with silver lines as fine as hair.

And then, every so often, something astonishing. This morning, tucked into a corner as if embarrassed by its own magnificence, was an elephant hawk-moth: a creature the colour of strawberry ice cream, pink and olive-green, sleek as a jet fighter, sitting perfectly still on my finger and quivering very slightly, like a tuning fork after it has been struck.

People ask me why I do it. My neighbour, who hears me at six in the morning muttering Latin names over a bucket, clearly thinks I have lost my mind. And it is hard to explain. Partly it is the surprise, the lucky dip of it: you never know what the night has delivered. Partly it is the counting, which matters, because there are fewer every year. But mostly, I think, it is the feeling of being let in on a secret. All this was happening in the dark, a few metres from my bed, while I slept.

By eight o’clock I have recorded them all and released them into the hedge, where they vanish instantly, brown into brown. The hawk-moth goes last. It sits on the rim of the bucket for a moment, fizzing its wings, and then it is gone, like a struck match.

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