The Music of Life Ongoing
Earlier this week, while researching for an article on prairie insects, one moth species made me do a double take: Rileyiana fovea, the mandolin moth.
When I’m not on the clock as a journalist, my mind and fingers are usually wrapped up with the eight-string acoustic instrument. I play the mandolin nearly every day, often picking out a few fiddle tunes between dinner and dishes. When I waste time on the Internet, I’m more likely scrolling the forums of mandolincafe.com than the endless feeds on Twitter or Instagram.
All this to say: I’ve got a new favorite insect. The mandolin moth, found mostly in Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe, was named for the song the male moth plays to attract a mate. He uses his hind leg to strum a vein on one of his wings. His body is concave like the bowl-back style mandolins you’d find in this part of the world.
But aside from my own musical preferences, the mandolin moth has me thinking about the inherent connection between the music we make with our hands and the music we hear outside. I had the mandolin moth in mind last night when, at sunset, I stepped out to my driveway to listen to life outdoors. A neighbor’s truck, a barking dog, the hiss of smoke from our chimney pipe. And then the melody of birdsong — something I thought I hadn’t heard since we dipped into subzero temperatures.
“Music is the trembling urgency and exuberance of life ongoing,” Kathleen Dean Moore wrote in an essay published in the Journal last year. “In a time of terrible silencing, what can we hear if we listen carefully, and what can Earth’s wild music tell us about how we ought to live?”
The mandolin moth is rare, and I can’t find any videos online of his song. But as I’m picking tunes in the evening, I’ll take some comfort knowing that he’s out there making his wild music.
Austin Price
Contributing Editor, Earth Island Journal
Photo by: Yarnim/Flickr. (Not a mandolin moth)
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