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| Fairy moth on purple Chinese houses. |
But I didn’t know it’s name when we first met, only that it had super cool antennae that looked like huge cat whiskers on its tiny body, and that it was letting me take as much video and photos as I wanted while it perched on a purple flower.
That was cool.
Even cooler was how a fellow hiker stopped to ask what I was crouching over so I could show her the super cool insect, which then made us both happy.
But coolest of all is how I learned the name of my new friend: A family member who just happened to know an entomologist she could ask!
Less than two hours after she forwarded on my photo, “Pete” from the Essig Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Berkeley, identified the creature as a “fairy moth, (family Adelidae) - probably Adela trigrapha, or a close relative. They are day-flying moths with super long antennae that usually emerge as spring flowers start to peak.”
That was super cool.
So cool, in fact, that knowing someone who knew the perfect person to ask for an ID on that moth made me even happier than seeing the moth did. Because I am still, and hope to always be, someone who prefers learning things from people like Pete, instead of “Professor Google.”
See the fairy moth and other cool finds here:
