Turning to the dark side of nature watching for a mental health boost

It was seven years ago this July, that a friend first showed me the wonders of being an amateur lepidopterist. Now, I’ve always been fascinated by life on earth and originally intended to be a marine biologist not a science writer. But, that’s by the by, I’m a science writer now and an amateur lepidopterist with seven years of experience. Over that time, I’ve logged and photographed well over 500 species of moth. Just 2000 or so to go for species recorded in the UK.

As a writer, it occurred to me that there’d be a great popular science book to be written about moths. The first idea I had was to pitch a book about how the moths got their names, and perhaps the butterflies too (butterflies are moths, by the way). But, of course, Peter Marren got in before me with his Chimney Sweepers book from 2019.

My next idea was to write up a moth journey, but I haven’t yet done that, most of my mothing has been in my garden and one or two campsite utility blocks and a few traps taken on holiday! Anyway, James Lowen’s book Much Ado About Mothing covered that kind of story back in 2021. Then, there’s Katty Baird who has beaten me to another style of moth book with her excellent 2023 book Meeting with Moths, in which she seeks out the Lepidoptera of Scotland. Then, there’s The Jewel Box by Tim Blackburn which looks at how moths shed light on nature’s hidden rules.

So, my only option is to trace my garden mothing back to its roots in 2018 and perhaps then to hook into the whole garden mothing experience that lots of people took up in 2020’s COVID-19 lockdown as an alternative to getting out and about to the birding and other nature sites…

Amateur moth-trapping, as we know, can contribute important data as part of citizen science efforts, shedding light on environmental changes, habitat loss, light pollution, and even the effects of climate change. It’s better to know than be ignorant of the moths as one idiotic article suggested in The Guardian a few years back. In it, it was suggested that trapping moths had a much greater than negligible impact on their lifecycle and ecosystems. It really doesn’t. A single bat eats 300 flying insects each night many of which are moths. There are likely to be dozens of bats in a country village alone, all doing the same. A single moth trap being run a couple of times a week sequesters data but only a few dozen moths and even then, they’re released back into the wild. Street lamps and always-on security lighting disrupt the moths everywhere far more than a garden trap.

Anyway, I wonder whether a book delving into the world of moths, the dark side (at least for the night-flying species) might be of interest. It’s a nature-watching hobby that those with limited ability to get out into the countryside can take up whether that’s through limited resources, inaccessibility of reserves and other nature hotspots, or when the law traps us in our homes and gardens as happened during the pandemic.

There are many mental health benefits to having a hobby, as we all know. There are also significant benefits to the brain itself in terms of keeping intellectually active and the notion of lifelong learning. Mothing is an incredibly deep rabbit hole down which to find oneself falling with 2500+ species known in the UK and lots to learn about each, not least their appearance and behaviour but their names and the meaning and etymology of those names. And, of course, there are the logs to keep and photos to take once identification has been done!