Mothing to boast of: Amateur moth expert expanding knowledge of species in Spokane area

According to top lepidopterists, no one knows more about Inland Northwest moths than Carl Barrentine.

Barrentine became the authority by scrutinizing well over 100,000 individual moths that have turned up in his Spokane backyard.

He has studied and handled live moths nearly every morning, from March through November, for the last six years. He has photographed upwards of 10,000 moths, deduced their scientific names and posted his pictures to internet forums and identification websites. He has found more than 800 species, kept unprecedented long-term records of his observations and, in all likelihood, documented the presence of a couple dozen moths previously unknown to Eastern Washington.

The vast majority of that work, Barrentine repeatedly says, has been “pretty boring.” But the retired biology professor keeps at it because a handful of times a year, as he’s looking through his traps at last night’s catch, he’ll spot a moth he’s never seen and feel a rush he can’t get any other way

“Remember Christmas morning when you were a little kid?” Barrentine asks. “This is the way it is for me, nine months of the year.”

Barrentine is a moth-er, someone who lures moths with lights for a hobby. Few moth-ers, however, have taken up mothing so assiduously.

Experts say Barrentine’s efforts are a gift to science.

“No one has done it the way he’s doing it,” said Richard Zack, a Washington State University entomology professor. “The type of information that he’s producing for that area is unavailable for 90% of the country.”

Barrentine starts his ritual around sunrise, when the air’s cool and moths are sluggish. First, he checks the four traps dangling from ultraviolet lights on the north side of his house: one by the bedroom, one downstairs, two on the deck.

His traps are polyester laundry hampers, stuffed with tattered egg cartons he scavenged from a local breakfast place six years ago.

“I was caught in the dumpster and I was laughed at a little bit,” Barrentine said sheepishly.

He pulls the cartons from the traps and holds each in his hands for a few moments, tilting it and peering at the moths through his Harry Potter-style glasses. In the heart of summer, Barrentine will find as many as 100 moths bedded down in the cozy cardboard of a single hamper. Inspecting 400 moths spread between four traps takes the better part of an hour.

Most of the visitors are regulars, species Barrentine’s seen numerous times this year. These receive little attention. He has already written down the relevant information about their existence, the times of year in which they actively flutter about Spokane, so he leaves them be.

Barrentine hunts for outliers, the kinds of moths he hasn’t seen this year, in the last few years or in his lifetime. The thought of missing these moths makes him anxious. They’re a big reason why he rarely skips a day.

If he’s lucky, Barrentine will find one or two moths of special interest in a given morning. He scoops them, plus 20 or so others, into little plastic condiment cups. Those cups go into the fridge, where the moths rest in a state of torpor, a sort of fleeting and harmless hibernation.

Once the light is good, Barrentine takes the moths out and deftly drops them on a cedar plank. He takes their pictures quickly, before they warm back up, and lets them fly back into his yard. Then he wraps up his mothing for the day by posting a quartet of photos in a few Facebook groups.

Barrentine can look at a tray of moths and rattle off their Latin names with ease. In autumn, some of the usual suspects belong to the genera Fishia, Heliothis, Euxoa, Lithophane and Amphypyra. And yet, the man who has almost certainly spent more time studying Inland Northwest moths than anyone else in history doesn’t have a favorite. He doesn’t consider them beautiful.

“I get people all the time that say, ‘I just love that moth,’ ” Barrentine said. “And I say, ‘How could you love a moth?’ “

That lack of sentimentality and disinterest in beauty sets him apart from many moth-ers.

Sure, moth-ers admit, many species are shades of brown and gray. Millions of years of natural selection have, for the most part, rewarded inconspicuousness.

“Their primary goal in life is to stay hidden,” said John Davis, a retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who began mothing southwest Washington in the mid-2000s.

Yet up close, moths boast intricate patterns, seemingly endless combinations of lines and dots that textile designers look to for inspiration and insect collectors stare at with fascination.

Not all moths are drab. The rosy maple moth, an East Coast species, looks like it was dreamed up by a toddler drawing with pink and yellow highlighters. Plume moths resemble flies, and sphinx moths pass for hummingbirds. The cecropia moth has ornately decorated wings the width of a grown man’s open hand. Emerald moths, no larger than quarters, roam Spokane backyards like nocturnal green butterflies.

None of that splendor means much to Barrentine. But when he starts talking about the mysteriousness of moths, his soft voice crescendos and his bright blue eyes light up.

“We can put a rover on Mars because physics, we understand. It’s beautiful, the numbers work,” Barrentine said. “But when we get to ecology, oh my God, the science is so complex.”

He loves pondering the ghost moths, whose larvae spend two or three years underground. He’s particularly interested in the genus Gazoryctra, full of predominantly brown species that can be difficult to tell apart. Lepidopterists refer to the ghost moths as “primitive,” since they evolved hundreds of millions of years ago and differ from most moths in fundamental ways. For instance, they don’t bother laying their eggs in neat clusters.

“They just drop their eggs like bombs when they’re flying,” said Barrentine, adding that some females aim their payloads at tree roots. “It’s like Blitzkrieg.”

Barrentine is chasing what biologists have chased for centuries. He says he’s searching for that feeling Charles Darwin must have felt every time he stepped off the HMS Beagle and explored a tropical island for the first time.

“I like the surprise, I like the anticipation, the serendipity of it,” Barrentine said. “You don’t know what you’re going to find, but you’re going to be challenged by it, and you’re going to make discoveries that nobody else in your neighborhood or the state is going to make.”

The mothing movement

Mothing exploded in popularity a decade ago, thanks in large part to a book.

“The Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America,” written by Seabrooke Leckie and David Beadle, made it possible for anyone to easily identify moths.

Whereas past field guides had only shown pictures of dead specimens, with their wings splayed in unnatural positions, Leckie and Beadle’s book showed pictures of moths at rest. For the first time, any curious person with a lightbulb could easily learn about the array of moths hidden all around them.

At the same time, the rise of insect identification websites such as BugGuide and iNaturalist made it increasingly simple for potential moth-ers to delve into what has historically been a daunting pastime. Facebook and other social media platforms allowed moth-ers to share pictures internationally with strangers, too, and find experts who could help put names to tricky findings. Today, there’s even a National Moth Week, which brings together thousands of moth-ers every July.

Many nature lovers gravitate to moths for their diversity. Entomologists estimate there could be 160,000 species, although many haven’t been discovered or even formally described. For context, the planet has roughly 17,500 species of butterfly, 11,000 species of bird and 6,400 species of mammal.

While an American birdwatcher can find all the species of birds that live near them within a few years, a moth-er is hard-pressed to see every species around them in a lifetime.

Lars Crabo, a Bellingham radiologist who moonlights as the Pacific Northwest’s foremost moth expert, said that’s a large part of why he’s been rabidly collecting moths for 40 years.

Most butterfly aficionados can never hope to uncover a new species, he said. But Crabo, technically an amateur, has personally given scientific names to dozens of moths.

“The opportunities for discovery are really great,” he said. “We find new ones all the time. That, to me, is really exciting.”

‘It’s about a sense of wonder’

Barrentine, who grew up in the Seattle area, probably wouldn’t have gone to college if he hadn’t liked birds.

“I was kind of lost,” he said. “Because of my eccentricities and asocial behaviors, I befriended birds, particularly the hawks. I fell in with the falconry crowd.”

Barrentine’s falconry friends urged him to become a biologist, and science became one of his lifelong passions. He’s published papers on swallows, sparrows, toads and weevils. He taught courses at multiple colleges over three decades and spent the bulk of his career as a professor at California State University, Bakersfield, and the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks.

His mothing addiction began in North Dakota in 2011. He plunged into mothing all on his own. In his mind, it was a natural progression, since he’d already learned all the birds, frogs and snakes.

“What’s left?” he asked. “Moths.”

Barrentine was prolific from the outset and maintained his output when he and his wife, Shelby, moved to Spokane six years ago to be closer to family. For 13 years, he’s been posting his moth pictures on BugGuide, the top insect identification website. Barrentine says he’s grateful for the experts he met on BugGuide who helped him in the beginning.

John VanDyk, an adjunct associate professor at Iowa State University who runs BugGuide, said Barrentine has uploaded 15,243 photos. That puts him ninth all time on BugGuide’s contributor rankings.

Despite being an undisputed heavyweight in the field of amateur entomology, Barrentine insists he’s clueless about moths.

He often remarks that he’s still in “Mothing 101,” and gets stumped by unidentifiable species on occasion. When he shares his photos on BugGuide or Facebook, he’ll always add caveats to his IDs, either too scared or too modest to declare a name with certainty.

“Ceranemota tearlei, I reckon,” he wrote in the caption to a recent picture. “This may be an example of Hyppa contrasta,” he wrote on another.

He consistently downplays his own expertise and accomplishments, but speaks glowingly of his peers.

Barrentine says Davis, the retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, and Dick Wilson, an oyster farmer, deserve all the credit for photographing and figuring out what moths live in Washington. Those two “pioneers” did most of their work on Washington’s moths in the mid-2000s.

“I’m just filling in the gaps,” Barrentine said. “As Isaac Newton said, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Barrentine’s reverence for expert moth-ers doesn’t stop with Davis and Wilson.

He describes Crabo as a sort of god. He frequently mentions legends such as Leckie, Chris Schmidt at Agriculture Canada, Jason Dombroskie at Cornell University and David L. Wagner, a University of Connecticut professor known as the caterpillar guy. He works these names into conversations the way rock ‘n’ roll fans bring up Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix or Freddie Mercury.

Moth-ers have strong words of praise to fire back at Barrentine, too.

Davis, for example, thinks of himself as “a remedial Carl.” Leckie, who is now working on a field guide for the moths of western North America, said she’s “incredibly grateful” for his work.

“Carl’s contributions to our understanding of moth populations have been outstanding,” she wrote in an email.

Moth-ers agree Barrentine’s observations have value, but quantifying that value is difficult.

“I am contributing in some small way,” he said. “It’s a really big job, and nobody else is crazy enough to do something like this.”

Davis said Barrentine’s records will establish important baseline data. Until now, no one knew exactly what moths lived in the Inland Northwest and what times of year they were active. Now, a detailed dataset exists, and moth-ers agree that’s worth a lot.

Birds, bats and other animals rely heavily on moths as a food source. Flowering plants rely on them as pollinators.

Zack, the WSU entomology professor, said understanding what’s going on with moths gives biologists a far greater ability to assess what’s happening in the natural world more broadly.

“Moths are a measure of the health of an ecosystem,” Crabo said. “His data will be useful in the future to document whether things are getting better or worse.”

Barrentine doesn’t have any grandiose visions for his data. He’d be thrilled if an intrepid graduate student could make use of his photos for a research project, long after he’s gone. His only concrete goal is to create a definitive checklist of Inland Northwest species, not unlike how John James Audubon compiled lists of birds two hundred years ago.

“This is so 19th century, what we’re doing here,” he said.

Soon, Barrentine expects to give up mothing. The boredom increases over time as he finds all the moths to be found.

For now, though, checking his traps still feels like opening presents on Christmas morning.

“What an education is about – it’s not about knowledge,” Barrentine said. “It’s about a sense of wonder.”