ATHOL – Several dozen people gathered at the home of Athol Bird & Nature Club President David Small last Saturday evening for the annual Moth Ball.

The event kicked off of National Moth Week, held in the last week of July 30. It originated in 2012, and celebrations take place in all 50 states and more than 80 countries. Small said that Athol’s Moth Ball began as a gathering of a few friends who wanted to learn about moths and grew to others interested in different nighttime insects.

“We reach out to anybody who wants to come out and experience it,” said Small. “It’s all part of our general mission familiarizing people with the life forms of North Quabbin – interpreting it for everybody, so everybody gets a chance to experience different things. Most people don’t go out at night and look at wildlife, so this is really kind of turning that on its head.”

Small said around 60 people showed up for the event including, someone from Otalona, Spain; Nashville, Tenn.; and Sacramento, Cali. There was also a group of graduate students from Harvard University and Boston University.

“It was really great that they showed up. One of them was working on the gypsy – now called ‘spongy’ – moth,” Small said. “We talked about infestations and going back into the historical records to when they first arrived in Massachusetts and doing DNA sequencing. It was really exciting to talk to those kids.”

Small said he was gratified to see how young minds are looking at climatic changes and other less obvious transformations taking place in the natural world.

“I’m encouraged by the enthusiasm of the young scientists who are working on this stuff.”

For the Moth Ball, Small had set up a variety of different lights in his back yard. One is a mercury vapor light, which emits a wide spectrum of light and is attractive to most insects. He also used an UV light, “which is the same kind of light you would have used with dayglo posters.” Two lights were mounted on the wall of a shed in his backyard, and a pair of portable lights were placed in the woods behind the home. The lights were hung before a white sheet, and insects attracted to the light would land on them.

“I also have a small vernal pool, and there’s a different set of insects that are attracted to it,” Small said. “So I provide a bunch of different options.”

Small said photographs and data collected during the evening were uploaded to the website iNaturalist, which he described as a “global inventory of life on earth.”

Small said the diversity among moths in North Quabbin is impressive.

“I have over a thousand species of moths that are right here in this yard,” he added. “I’m trying to document them all and get them confirmed on iNaturalist.”

Among the different moths seen that evening was the polyphemus, a large silk moth.

“They have about a five-inch wingspan, and they’re brown with big eye spots and they’re quite spectacular,” said Small. “We had two that showed up at about one o’clock in the morning.”

The Athol Bird & Nature Club is presenting free programs during July and August at the Millers Environmental Center, 100 Main St. Athol. The building will be open from 1-4 p.m. Programs start at 1:30 p.m. and special activities will be offered for children on each day. On Sunday, July 30, the topic will be birds, followed by ferns on Aug. 6, moose on Aug. 13, geology on Aug. 20, and reptiles on Aug. 27. For more information, visit https://atholbirdclub.org.

Greg Vine can be reached at gvineadn@gmail.com.

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