burning koala

It seems that Australia has a type of moth that, during the spring, migrates en mass. This is in the tens of million en mass. It’s called a Bogong Moth and is eaten by the Aboriginals and is supposedly a great source of protein. Tastes like walnuts I am told (although, as far as I am concerned, walnuts taste like dirt). We have been finding one or two of these huge moths in our apartment every night and assumed they were getting in through the small gaps in our casement windows. I spent an afternoon plugging them up with strips of paper towels and considered the matter closed.

Well, we came back to our place last evening to find about a dozen of them flying about the place. We couldn’t believe it. How the hell were they getting in? While Angela was on the porch trying to shoo them out the door, she noticed that the vent outside our bedroom wall was absolutely covered (by like 50 moths). You can see where they are making their entrance here:

Sure enough, they were crawling through the vent into the apartment. So I taped up some paper to close off the vent and commiserated with Angela on who the hell would design a system that vented out into the air with no screen to keep little buggers out of the place. Then I noticed that we have ceiling vents all through the apartment and they were still gaining entry. Luckily I figured out that you could squeeze the little vent louvers closed, but now we have no air circulating and it has been up in the 90s the last few days.

Hopefully this plague of moths will be over soon.