The moth effect

I see that I last spotted, and blipped, a magpie moth in August 2017. Somehow this one emerged out of the insect desert we live in  and parked itself on the threshold where I found it and removed it to the large planter beside the front door. Safer surely - but then I wondered if I had simply exposed it to a bird's eye view as it lay there, or fluttered away.
 This year's new swallows are swooping and diving all around the farmyard, putting themselves through the intensive training, and high calorie diet, required for their upcoming Olympic flight path to the southern  hemisphere.

Whenever you try to interfere with nature you risk upsetting the applecart. If a butterfly flapping its wings in Amazonia can create a chain of events that cause a typhoon on the other side of the world... Well, who knows, it's only a theory, chaos theory.

The wonderful Scottish  poet and writer Kathleen Jamie had a similar experience when trying to rescue a magpie moth she found floating in a loch:

'Enough. The bubble of my attention popped. I stood too quickly, swooned a little, because there was the wide moor, the loch and breezy grasses reaching for miles, all scaling up to meet me. I’d been absorbed in the minuscule: a moth’s eye, a dab of lichen; been granted a glimpse into the countless millions of tiny processes and events that form the moor. Millions! Tiny creatures, flowers, bacteria, opening, growing, dividing, creeping about their business. It’s all happening out there, and all you have to do, girl, is get your foot out of your eye.'


You can read her whole, short, essay here. 

(I love Jamie's writing and was fortunate enough to find her book Sightlines which contains  this essay, in a charity shop earlier this year.)