For Release June 19, 2001

Butterflies and Moths Abundant This Year

AGRI-VIEWS
by Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent

I am constantly amazed by how much the natural world changes from year to year. Each plant and animal species reacts differently to the various combinations of weather and weather extremes. If you have taken a drive in the country this year, you probably couldn’t help but notice the clusters of brilliant orange blossoms of butterfly milkweed.

If you have been outdoors at all this spring you have probably also noticed a lot of butterflies and moths. For whatever reason, we have had an abundance of the insect order, Lepidoptera this spring. Keep in mind that most of those early spring species were the result of caterpillars that fed late last summer and overwintered in cocoons. So while the weather was right for the cocoons to survive the winter and this spring, there were also a lot of caterpillars out there last fall.

Many of the early season moths have been that group that we refer to as millers. These are small dingy brown or gray moths that have a triangular shape when they are resting. Millers are the adult of various cutworms, armyworms, etc. If you remember back to August of last year, we had a big explosion of army cutworms in lawns. After they were through decimating your lawn, they spun their cocoons and waited until this spring.

But it wasn’t just cutworm moths that we were seeing. There were also numerous butterfly species. Red Admirals, Painted Ladies, Mourning Cloaks and Tiger Swallowtails have also been abundant this year. Now that the spring has almost progressed into summer, we are also seeing a lot of Hackberry Butterflies. If you had a tree that was blooming this year, it was probably heavily visited by butterflies and moths. Since many moths are active only at night, they rest during the day, often in lawns. The sight of hundreds of moths erupting from a lawn when a homeowner walked across it, or a constant stream of butterflies flocking into a tree, prompted many a nervous homeowner to call to see if these moths or butterflies were going to be damaging their plants.

Butterflies and moths can not directly damage plants. Their mouth is a long coiled tube known as a proboscis. The only feeding that they can do with this structure is to suck nectar and water. If you are quiet and watch a butterfly at a flower, you can watch this tube uncoil to feed and then coil back up out of the way. So the presence of these butterflies and moths is nothing to be overly excited about.

However, they do lay eggs, the eggs hatch into caterpillars and caterpillars have mouth parts that are designed to eat plants. A large population of adults can lead to a lot of egg laying. But it may not. Predators of the adults, the eggs and the young caterpillars, plus adverse weather conditions, may preclude damaging levels of the caterpillars from developing. It does little good to try to control potential damage by spraying large concentrations of the adults. But it does alert you of the need to scout your lawns, gardens, trees and crops for potentially damaging populations of caterpillars.

We’ve also had a lot of hummingbird moths this year. These are members of the sphinx moth family. Homeowners often confuse these with true hummingbirds. There are some quick ways to tell them apart. Hummingbird moths fly with their body horizontal, you can see their mouth uncoil to feed, they have no obvious tail and they are generally brown in color. Hummingbirds fly with their body upright, they have a fixed solid beak that does not coil up, they have a very distinctive tail with distinctive black and white on it and they are predominantly an iridescent green color.

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