Our second annual Mothing Night at Kirby Nature Center was a great success! This year, we scheduled the event to follow our Volunteer Appreciation Picnic, so the convivial atmosphere at the dinner tables carried right on into the evening, with people gathered round the fire to toast marshmallows while we set up the blacklight sheets near the prairie edge. As the sun sank and darkness fell, the moths (and other insects) began to appear, flying in to the soundtrack of annual cicadas calling from the treetops and meadow katydids and crickets singing in the prairie. Soon, there were plenty of winged visitors at both of our blacklight stations.
With a whopping 56 people registered for the event, there was plenty of opportunity to use the buddy system for photography, with one person shining a light on the subject while others snapped photos. The weather cooperated this year, so we were able to continue monitoring the blacklight stations until after 11:00 p.m., when we reluctantly turned off the lights, shook the sheets free of hangers-on, packed up our gear, and went home to admire our photos.
2026 mothing night at Kirby
As the observations came into our iNaturalist project (inaturalist.org/projects/2026-mothing-night-at-kirby-nature-center), we were thrilled to see that we netted even greater results than last year’s! At the moment, we have 187 observations (a 115% increase over last year) and have recorded 86 different arthropod species (a 56% increase). We saw just 19 species of moths in 2025 (when our Mothing Night was cut short by rain), but far surpassed that with 37 species identified so far this year. Observations may be added to the project at any time, so if you attended the event and have any photos of insects from Mothing Night, we would love you to add them! Likewise, the number of species may grow as more IDs are added by iNaturalist volunteers.
Medicine Moth
Why Mothing Matters!
Our Mothing Night is part of National Moth Week (nationalmothweek.org), a volunteer initiative that began in 2012 to promote mothing as a fun, social activity that also yields important data. It has grown every year and is now a global event, with more than 90 countries participating around the world. As pollinators and foundational parts of the food web, moths offer valuable insights into the health and biodiversity of our surroundings. Moth species greatly outnumber butterflies, with about 14 moths for each butterfly species in North America (≈10,000 vs. 700 species)! Moths are easy to observe and (with some exceptions) identify, so each mothing event captures a snapshot of moth diversity in a local ecosystem, making it possible to detect patterns over time. Our projects include observations of all arthropods, so we also gather data about other ecological indicator species such as caddisflies and even tiger beetles.
As our Mothing Nights continue, we will create an umbrella project that will provide an at-a-glance overview of the arthropod diversity at Kirby Nature Center, and hopefully we’ll see our species numbers continue to grow!