![]() One of the most rewarding parts of studying moths this year has been following the emergence and disappearance of different species as their “flight periods” come and go. For reasons of feasibility, I confined myself to “macromoths,” largely ignoring the smaller and even more numerous but very tricky to identify “micromoths.” ![]() In addition to seeing as many species as I could myself, I generated a list of all moths from eight target families reported on BAMONA from Whatcom, Skagit, Okanogan, and Chelan Counties. Opler’s excellent reference book, Moths of Western North America, as well as the expertise of editors at the citizen science website Butterflies and Moths of North America (BAMONA). I identified as many moth species as possible, including those I found this spring as well as specimens collected last summer and fall. This spring, I embarked on a project to seek out moths wherever I could: below lights on the outsides of buildings after dark, hiding on the bark of trees and walls by day, and-for day-flying species-flitting across trails in patches of sunlight in the North Cascades forest. Most moths are even less noticed, due to the nocturnal habitats, nondescript colors, and tiny size of many species. gratulata at some point-but most people who take time to notice it at all will likely mistake this day-flying moth species for a small butterfly. If you spend time outside in western Washington, you’ve probably seen an M. I was drawn to moths partly because of their vast diversity-there are some 11,000 species in North America, far more than the 750 or so butterflies-and partly because of how deeply underappreciated they are. I chose the hundreds of moth species in the North Cascades as the subject for my in-depth study of a natural history topic at North Cascades Institute this spring. This small insect, with its delicate wings of white, gray, and dark brown, is a sign that sunny days and warmer weather have finally arrived. To my mind, it isn’t truly spring in the lush, green landscape on the west side of the Cascades until the first half-white carpet moth ( Mesoleuca gratulata ) has flown. Their fur was used to line parkas, though this practice is far less common today and the animals are protected in many areas.By Nick Engelfried, graduate student in the Institute’s 16th cohort. Wolverines sport heavy, attractive fur that once made them a prime trapper's target in North America. Kits sometimes live with their mother until they reach their own reproductive age-about two years old. Females den in the snow or under similar cover to give birth to two or three young each late winter or early spring. Males scent-mark their territories, but they share them with several females and are believed to be polygamous. Such finds sustain them in winter when other prey may be thinner on the ground, though they have also been known to dig into burrows and eat hibernating mammals. These opportunistic eaters also feed on carrion-the corpses of larger mammals, such as elk, deer, and caribou. Wolverines easily dispatch smaller prey, such as rabbits and rodents, but may even attack animals many times their size, such as caribou, if the prey appears to be weak or injured. Wolverines eat a bit of vegetarian fare, like plants and berries, in the summer season, but this does not make up a major part of their diet-they are tenacious predators with a taste for meat. Because of these habitat requirements, wolverines frequent remote boreal forests, taiga, and tundra in the northern latitudes of Europe, Asia, and North America. Individual wolverines may travel 15 miles in a day in search of food.
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