Happy Halloween, everyone! Hope everyone is having an interesting evening. After all, not only is it Halloween, but there is a full blue moon, tonight, too! It somehow seems fitting in the crazy year 2020 has been! In keeping with the Halloween spirit, I thought I’d show you guys a couple of beautiful moths. The first one is the black witch moth.

This particular moth is a female. They are a little larger and are more colorful than the males. Only the females tend to have the two white bars across the middles of the wings. They are native to South America, Mexico, and into the southern United States. The adults eat fruit, nectar, and tree sap, while the caterpillars eat leaves, and can cause crop damage. This one was fluttering around at my Mom’s house going from plant to plant. I had to follow her around the yard and shoot a bunch of photos to get a few good ones, but it turned out to be worthwhile. In this one, she was just fluttering around these flowers. I got lucky, and managed to catch her with her beautiful wings spread wide.

I picked this little beauty due to it’s Halloween colors. Meet the scarlet winged lichen moth. It is a much smaller moth than the black witch, and it’s native habitat is further north. It can range up into the northern United States and Canada, but isn’t usually found much further south than northern Mexico. Just like the black witch, it eats nectar, fruit, and sap and it’s caterpillars eat leaves. They like to live around pine trees, so central Florida is a great place for them. This one was on the wall of my house one night, under the porch light. Unlike the black witch, this one was a very willing subject. In fact, it was still on the wall the next morning when I got up, but was gone before I left for work. Probably back into the pine woods that are all around us.