It’s not the free movement of people I spend my nights fretting about; it’s the free movement of pests. It’s the thuggy Spanish bluebells invading our woodland and killing our own delicate flowers; it’s the Asian caterpillars devastating our box hedges; it’s the black-winged killer ladybirds from North America wiping out our spotted red ones with a nasty fungal disease. And — particularly worrying for anyone trying to run a household — it’s the tiny webbing clothes moths, thought to have originated from South Africa, their larvae feasting on our favourite cardigans and carpets — probably feasting right now, under the very bed in which we are failing to sleep.
At Brodsworth Hall in South Yorkshire last week, Amber Xavier-Rowe, head of collections conservation for English Heritage, showed me the devastation wrought by moths before her Integrated Pest Management team came along to get a grip, with their strict cleaning rotas. Vast swaths of Victorian carpet had been eaten threadbare under a sideboard. Stuffed birds had been stripped bald, their feathers devoured. As we went into each room I could see Amber’s eyes dart beadily towards the danger spots — carpet on carpet, or chests of drawers on carpet: dark places where dark deeds are done out of sight.
She showed me a graph: at English Heritage’s sites across the UK over the past five years, the number of webbing clothes moths caught in monitoring traps has risen from 566 to 2,649 — a fivefold increase. The warmer our houses and summers become, she tells me, the more egg-laying cycles there will be in a year. Female moths lay up to 50 eggs at a time and each hatch a very hungry mini caterpillar.
What on earth can we do about this? Well, we should all by now have installed our English Heritage clothes-moth trap at home (have you?) in order to help them monitor what’s going on — to work out why tineola bisselliella (webbing clothes moth) has so dramatically overtaken tinea pellionella (case-bearing clothes moth), and whether we need to worry about monopis crocicapitella, ‘the new kid on the block’, a pale variety with a line on its wings.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in