This past week I've been flirting with moths - very small moths.

Working outside most of the time as I do, and being a life-long bugwatcher, I keep on noticing more and more bugs as the weather warms. Working in Snohomish the past few weeks I kept seeing tiny black and white moths - I knew they were moths because they were smaller than our smallest butterflies - about a 3/8'' wingspan. Due to our squirrelly April weather I missed seeing them for awhile.

A few days later I was snooping around a blooming Mahonia (now reclassified as Berberis) repens that I,ve planted over the years in a small private park. It was being staked out by a male Anna's Hummingbird doing territorial flights over it. (I'd seen the hummers there since February when the plant started blooming). Mahonia's are great bug magnets - the shrub was swarming with various flies, bees and wasps. And... the tiniest moths I've seen to date.

I thought the tiny moths I'd seen earlier in the week were small, and they are, but this one takes the cake. The only reason I noticed it was that it is brilliant white. At first I thought they were blue, but I guess they just were reflecting the briefly blue April skies. They're quite zippy for being so small. The size of this creature: get out a penny and flip it to the tails side. This bug is about the size of the O of One Cent. Just a couple of millimeters. One finally landed and I ran to my truck and got my 10x magnifying glass which is really designed to examine inanimate objects, but I did get a good look at it. All white (maybe a touch of grey clouding in it's short wings) with black eyes. The narrow antennae spread out opposite of each other giving the bug a sort of T- headed look. Then one landed on my fingertip - we were really getting along! Through the 10x lens it looked as if perched on some SE Utah rock formation - my' fingerprints'. Later in the week I saw quite a few more - on rhodies, ect.

The smallest Moth in the World ? I suppose not, but at only a few millimeters in size there can't be one much smaller. As I often find when focusing down on Very Small Things, there is alway's something smaller. As I viewed my new moth aquaintance thru the hand-lens, an extremely tiny wasp landed nearby - making my moth look pretty large. Viewing smaller things than that would require better optics than I have.

After viewing such tiny wonders, whether it be bugs, pond or sea creatures, I often have the sense of 'Reentry to the Larger World'. As I was quietly snooping on these bugs a Black-capped Chickadee landed in the Mahonia to check out what I was up to. After the tiny things I'd been looking at, it appeared to be about the size of a Goodyear blimp. It's all a matter of perspective.

Jeff Gibson
In tiny Snohomish County.