Katherine Pogson

Awakening

May
My mother says she can hear the earth rising. “Soughing” she calls it. “Like trees in the wind?” 

“No, that is a different sound.” “What does it sound like?” “Difficult to describe”.

We tell her it is the surge of her own blood, pumping in the thinning veins of her ears. She says no. There - can you hear that? A sort of swelling; the Earth.

This is not a metaphor. Her illness makes her sensory perception distorted, but particular.

On the roof, a magpie carefully prises out the rubber seal from between the joints of a metal parapet, and removes the strip of lead from beneath. An opening ceremony.

The traffic is constant but at 4 o’clock in the morning the birds do hold this place. I am in a crucible, delineated by redundant chimneys, television aerials and scaffolding poles, broken only by the upturned bowls of a few remnant trees. A flat square of asphalt at upper window height for the Victorian terraces around, this platform is exposed; an arena, a stage for something.

From their separate vantage points in the scattered canopy, bird calls ripple out, building a cage of noise in the air. Darkness creates a synaesthesia where sound becomes space. A sonic architecture, tasted between the temples. The signals (from left and right) act more like sonar than call and response, not marking out the boundaries of territories, but probing from the centres of fragmented strongholds, bumping together where they encounter resistance.  

Overhead a solitary gull floats silently, paler than the sky. The only other living thing I see.

Walking in the half-light is a surprise - I find it hard to balance. My feet constantly recalibrate themselves as if on a tightrope. This twitching reminds me of the endless readjustment of my mother’s Parkinson’s legs. Her unruly knees. Her unsureness of the ground. 

Trying to stand planted, I imagine the chalk bowl of London beneath me, two floors down, through the joists and cavities of the building. This flat roof marks the footprint of a small converted garment factory, built in the 1970s. Before that, a Mews for working horses, dragging goods along the Hollow Way to the market at Nag’s Head. The back wall of my bedroom on the ground floor is the only remnant of that stable; together with the drains.

Water will seep laterally into crevices, blooming later in unaccountable places. Ants will drown in the air pockets between walls where they have built their vertical empire. 

What can you remember when you don’t even know what you have lost? If there is a pattern to this necrosis, it does not follow a logic that can be mapped. In these moments of pause, the question arises: is it enough to keep living in the fuzzy present, only half aware of the things that are missing? How would it be to embrace this dissolution more knowingly?

The river Thames was once thicketed by dense Yew forest up to its banks; the remains, silted stumps, can still be seen at Erith at low tide. 

Just as I am concentrating on locating the birdsong, the white gull returns. It circles over my head, wheeling and calling, a raking cry. It is joined by two more, and as the sky pales, I can see they are black-backed gulls, far from the sea. And they see me. There are seven, then eleven, then twelve.

I sit still, the songs of birds I do not know the names of drowned out by gulls and crows and pigeons.

The white shapes over my head continue to dip and circle, wanting something from me.

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Letting go
August
‘Kitten-face’ is lying doggo. Hanging, actually. The caterpillar is suspended from the corkscrew Hazel on an invisible thread. Rotating gently, rigid. The tree is lively with ants, patrolling their aphid flocks. Is it on its way to pupate? Nothing happens for a long time, so I go inside to cook supper. 

The ‘gay twig’ is a contorted ball of foliage only a couple of feet tall, dangling long catkins in February and covered in giant scale insects that I no longer try to wipe away. My partner had it before we met, lodging it with friends from time to time between moves. Named after a passing floral fad decades ago, layers of communal memories are accreted in this shrub.

Clipping it on a hot July day ten days ago, I experienced a sudden, dizzying zoom to close-up. An odd cat-like face with two large ears sticking up came into focus between the blades of my shears. The twig I was about to snip was a caterpillar, standing stiffly out at an angle from the branch, perfectly mimicking the surroundings. No sign of any other brood, or even of telltale feeding. I absorbed a spike of adrenaline at the violence avoided.

Twitter helped me to identify this feline as a larva of the Peppered moth. The caterpillar has a skin capable of sensing and attuning to the exact colours of the bark it sits on. The adult displays a wide silky body between parted wings, dusted all over with specks of black on white. Thus they create the illusion of silver birch bark, to which the Latin name betularia refers. Famed for blackening (along with cities and people’s lungs) during the rise of industrialisation, this gorgeous moth, despite its chameleonic talents, is one of those experiencing a sharp decline in abundance, even while spreading more widely.

But the blackening of the Peppered moth has nothing to do with humans. Many moths exhibit local forms – variations in colour, which often relate to specific geologies. In Great Britain, northern forms are often darker. A chance mutation early in the nineteenth century happened to coincide with the rise of the pollution which covered trees in soot in the countryside around Manchester. Biologist Menno Schiltuizen points out that human changes to the environment merely accelerated the evolutionary process; once the mutated black moth existed, its melanic colouring gave it an advantage of concealment over its paler brethren, encoded in its DNA. Selection by predation did the rest. In post-industrial Britain, the process has reversed itself; all the specimens I have seen are of the predominantly white variety.

Is it here because of my activities? Pondering when the egg might have been laid, I looked for potential parents in my light-trap records. There was a male on 8th June and a possible female on 5th July. It is mostly the males that come to light, apparently. 

…………………..
When I come back from the kitchen, the caterpillar is down in the earth of the pot, being attacked by numerous ants. Black garden ants: one of the earliest residents to colonise my terrace-come-observatory. They have built their nurseries in the coiled chambers of the whelk shells I placed round the roots of the potted trees. Apparently, they don’t sting, so they must just be biting this caterpillar. Rearing up, it flails manically from side to side, swinging its head like a club. Perhaps it is not on the march to pupate, the active danger-time of transition, but only trying to escape the ants? At 40mm it doesn't look fat and ready. My reading suggests Autumn would be the time. 

Behind me, three chrysalises of the Comma butterfly hang where I have tied them, suspended from sticks, back onto the potted Wych Elm on which they hatched. A month ago, I happened to look up from my kitchen table and saw the female visit, hover and return to this plant. I knew what she was doing. Something in her movement was intent, gravid. I found an egg. When the plant dried up in the heatwave, I took the fat spiky larvae with me on holiday to Cornwall, and brought them back as cocoons. The heatwave gave me an excuse to frame my curiosity as care. These and the Peppered moth may have been laid days apart.

I lift the caterpillar on a leaf onto a smaller pot to see if it might burrow into ant free ground. But it circles the rim in classic inchworm fashion. An enormous set of rubbery back legs clamp on to the rim like an oversized trainer. The clumpiness of this false ‘foot’ fringed with hairs, coupled with the urgency of its elastic movement repulses me. Kitten one end, alien the other. I feel wonder, revulsion, desire, guilt, ignorance and responsibility all at once.

Sensing another portable nursery scenario of jars and leaves and cool-bags (we were going away at the weekend), my partner persuades me to release it in the park across the road. I say goodbye to the selfish dream of watching the ermine-velvet creature emerge. We wander in the dark and leave it among some low brambles in an overgrown spot. The chrysalis will overwinter under the ground, and emerge next Spring. But I am not really confident in my choice of place: good ground cover, but on the edge of the park, near the street lights…

Another way station in the neighbourhood for me to contemplate. The bush where I left the Peppered moth.

The first Comma butterfly emerged the next day. The whole life cycle, speeded up by the heat it seems, took only forty seven days.

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Alien

April
I wondered how long this would take to happen. Some leaves on one of our twin Box tree seedlings are papery, brown and stuck together – I can see black shiny heads hiding within. Skeletonised hedges abound nearby, no trace of chlorophyll left. These eggs will have been laid last Autumn, hatching unnoticed between pairs of stitched-together leaves on a terrace ignored over winter.

The adult Box-tree moth is a precise white triangle, a corner of paper, the borders sprayed black. Mourning stationery updated with a graffiti slant. Magpie energy. (The image of Alexander McQueen’s 1999 spray painted dress, beloved of my students, springs to mind). Melanic individuals are relatively common though, where the whole wing is suffused brown-black apart from a tiny crescent moon of white. Not the famous industrial melanisation theory taught to school children about the Peppered moth. A recessive gene? I think of brown sheep in a flock of white and look it up. Both types give off a violet iridescent sheen. I wrote ‘are covered in’ at first, but that is not true. Colour in moths is the result of light diffracting through specially shaped wing scales, there is no pigment.

This moth reached the U.K. in 2007, first recorded, as with so many adventitious species, in Kent. Originating in East Asia, it is supposed they were imported on planting stocks for garden centres, but could also have arrived on the wing, having passed steadily through Europe in the previous years. I think of my excitement when reading about species being recorded first along the Kent coast, where I often visit (Clancy’s Rustic, New Romney 2002) or holding on only in the shingle of Dungeness (Sussex Emerald) where its food plant, wild carrot, can be found.

It is often said of prolific, recently arrived species that no predator has yet found them out. Apparently, the even more recently arrived Asian hornet will predate Cydalima larvae in Europe, but only where present prior to the moths. The black green and yellow spiky caterpillars appear poisonous indeed. A friend squashes them one by one between his fingers, green blood running clear. I cannot bring myself to do this.

I do decide that this foot-high plant is more important than the creatures born on it, even though there is one untouched sapling nearby. I reject an idea borrowed from sustainable fashion, that of the ‘sacrifice’ article. Orsola De Castro leaves an old cashmere jumper in the corner of her wardrobe as an offering for the clothes moths. I applaud the intent, but who would not proliferate from a stronghold given the encouragement of a suitable habitat? A rolled up oriental rug has taught me this. I seal my jumpers in zip-lock bags, and eliminate the blond streaks on sight. They are not an endangered species I tell myself, brushing a dusty smear from a wall. 

After carefully pruning the miniature box, pulling the brown clumps of leaves apart to pick out the caterpillars, I sluice the entire plant under the kitchen tap. The amputated twigs and larvae are tied up in the food waste bin, sealing their fate as much as if I had squashed them.

Curiosity and disgust are selective emotions it seems. I am someone who removes snails from the middle of busy pavements. My tiny terrace overburdened with ragged pot-bound trees is a triumph of rewilding, a cenote hole of lushness let into the first floor of an ex-industrial building. The governing principle of neglect rather than control has brought a succession of mosses, spiders, and latterly mushrooms growing out of a rain-soaked rotten plank. I am deeply attached to the life forms layering up over time on the other side of the glass. Companions at breakfast. Seasonal friends. Family. And now suddenly I am commiting murderous topiary? 

In the enclosed sphere of my domestic space, I choose to place two moth species in the category of pest because they destroy things I value more than them. The fact that neither are rare is a convenient excuse. I shift to think at species level in order to exterminate individuals, while wincing at my intentional violence. It is a question of scale.

Climb a few hundred metres up the cliff path to stand above the port of Dover and you can easily see France. Someone will say “you can read the time on the clock of the town hall at Calais” every time we visit. No sign of the little boats coming the other way except on television. We read about the numbers, and recognise the days with suitable weather. Ferries, cruise ships and freight liners glide over the Goodwin Sands. Once part of Doggerland, this now treacherous bank of quicksand, famous for swallowing wrecks for at least a thousand years, was a land bridge for Mesolithic people, until sea levels rose to drown their hunting grounds and cut off their walking route to the island which became Great Britain.

Later, I find the front quarter of a caterpillar body, neatly snipped off, on the upper of my slipper. I look closely to see if it is still moving, capable of movement. It is not.

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Fragmentation

My mother lays a full water glass on its side in her make up bag, zips it up and begins to eat another tissue. Scientific illustrator Cornelia Hesse-Honegger meticulously documents a soft bug with a wing part growing out of its eye. Neither of these manifestations are intentional. It is easy to see them as programming errors within a specific body, but they are more juicy than that - they are living processes in constant reaction within their surroundings. Understanding these aberrations involves thinking about environmental relationships, rather than dosing or operating on the individual body only.

A chemical trap, a pheromone lure, is opened in a London cemetery, and within minutes, dozens of large, wasp-like insects with transparent wings and yellow-banded bodies appear. Not hornets. These are Raspberry Clearwing moths. They were there all along.

(If only JH Fabre had had pheromone lures! The French ‘father of entomology’ cut off the antennae of male Giant Peacock moths in his quest to discover the mechanism of their attraction to the ‘virgin queen’.) 

A painter taking part in a Parkinson’s drug test experiences a period of rich activity. “It came back” he said. He is on the placebo, but the suggestion that his brain might remember, the hope, was enough of a stimulus to produce a rich new spurt of dopamine.

Tiny iridescent green flies congregate at the window, Blowflies from the dead rat in the kitchen wall. I picked 36 pupa out of the stained carpet under her chair. 

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Risk

August
Walking down Everton Street, I found an injured Lime Hawk moth caterpillar underneath a birch tree on the street. It’s the time of year you might encounter such wanderers underfoot, like a visitation, searching urgently for a place to transform. Unmistakable, this one, with its violet body and pointed turquoise tail.

There is a compression between the third and fourth body segments, perhaps made by the beak of a bird. Matter extrudes from the rear, its innards lie drying on the pavement. But still it is trying to march on. I wrap it in a tissue and carry it on in my bosom to the tube station. Futile mother.

Immobile and rubbery, it lingered for three days, shrinking slowly. Of course whatever was lost in that catastrophic squeezing was vital for the conversion to the next stage. I try to imagine what bits of DNA it could possibly have retained (the imaginal discs?) towards the strange soupy change of metamorphosis.

So the Chinese red birch has become a memorial post; a way station on my way to the station. 

I grew up on the kind of Lime-tree lined London street that this creature is supposed to favour, but never saw a single khaki-camouflaged adult with its scalloped sycamore-seed wings. The internet tells me they have been steadily moving Northwards for decades, reaching Yorkshire in the 1950s. I like to imagine hordes of marching lilac wrigglers, waving their turquoise horns in formation as they go; but of course, inch by inch, they flew.

Carrying everything required within yourself, it is nevertheless necessary to dissolve completely to fulfil your potential. 

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Dorsal tilting

05:45 am. A pink sky and a light breeze. The lead cladding of the parapet is covered in dew. My hand slips as I climb over and I almost step on a Jersey Tiger flat on its back on the peeling paint of the roof. There are dozens of them. Bodies scattered around the light trap, like slumbering boozers in the aftermath of a party. But more like an explosion. As if something had burst, throwing the clustered moths out and backwards. They lie stuck, wings plastered to the wet surface, some black legs bicycling in the air, some still. What happened? Did a bird swoop down? Is it to do with the angle of flight? (I recently learned that moths are not ‘attracted to light’ but angle their backs to it to navigate by the moon.)

I offer the corner of a tissue to the first pair of cycling legs, which grasp it. Gently I slide the creature out of the wet, leaving a swirl of black and silver wing scales in the water. Its wings are just old skin now, translucent, devoid of colour, of nap. 

One by one, I lift more than twenty individual moths, some tiny, and place them right way up on the egg boxes in the trap to dry off. 

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I got my eye in

July
Sensory sensitivity is inconvenient, especially when navigating urban environments, where it seems necessary to edit out, shut down responses to certain stimuli, especially in transit. Noises, smells, distracting signs. But I have got my eye in now. I begin to spot moths in - I was going to write unlikely places - but perhaps ignored would be more accurate. (I have adopted this practice of drawing my attention to anthropocentric assumptions when I spot them when writing, as a self-checking device, an application of critical anthropomorphism). A Riband Wave the colour of old newspaper splayed against the riser step of an exit from an overground platform. A Least Carpet plastered to the window of a take-away restaurant near Granary Square. I know the size and shape and season of them now. I see them. 

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Moths and their Haunts

August
I have never seen a Garden Tiger moth in the UK (and only ever once, in an allotment in the south of France.) A cold-loving species, they are the woolly bear caterpillars of a nineteen seventies British childhood, seen crawling urgently in spiky fur during the summer months, and have decreased in abundance by 88% since 1970.

The adult moth has rounded wing ends, pendulous red underwings with circles of iridescent indigo and a pompom of velvet brown head fur. The patterns on its brown and white outer wings recall the chequered hide of the giraffe.

If the disappearing Garden Tiger is all roundness, the day-flying Jersey Tiger is angular, vampiric in silhouette, its black outer wings not dappled, but cut with zebra stripes. It is the moth that friends send me pictures of the most, from Borough Market, from office balconies: “What is this?” Jazzy day-flying summer apparition.

British Moths and their Haunts (Newman, 1952) combines enigmatic black and white images of the post-war British countryside with poetic descriptions of where native species hang out. Or used to. The book describes the arrival of the Jersey Tiger on the south Coast of Britain as “late in the last century”, at the end of the Victorian era. Now, I will catch more than forty in one hot August night in London.

The hindwings are nasturtium coloured – tomato red or orange-yellow. (Is nasturtium a native food plant in the Channel Isles? I must look that up…)

In strong flight, the flash of colour reminds me of flamenco dancers, flouncing their coloured skirts. Thus we characterise the exotic, its vitality and allure, its threatening, alien strength. (I later discovered that it has another vernacular name that I had not heard of, the Spanish Flag.)

 “With its scarlet petticoats…” What a cliche! Are scarlet petticoats still even a living memory? Does the phrase hang on, with faint connotations of street whores and Dickensian musicals, Jack the Ripper, just something we say, unaware of the buried origin story?

It seems that the Jersey Tiger is replacing the Garden in terms of public familiarity. One is disappearing and one has increased in abundance in the UK by almost 600% in the last twenty five years. This is not because the J.T is driving out the Garden, but because warm, wet winters and springs do not suit the woolly bear.

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Stitching the world back together
October
Early days as a research student. I am giving my first presentation to a group of peers and a few staff. I haven’t used Powerpoint for years. It has taken me two days to organise my visuals and collect my textual references: from museum objects via craft making to biodiversity loss. Images of downward spirals of moth populations. How can I link my environmental hobby and my textile practice to speak of nature relationships? There is an awkward silence at the end. Eventually someone says “B-b-but moths… don’t they just eat your clothes?” “And our collections!” breathes someone from Curation.

I go home and make a slide with two and a half thousand moth images, one for each UK species, snapshotting in to just four tiny squares in one corner - the ones you might find in your wardrobe and your larder. If you don't keep them clean.
…………….
June
I bought it partly because it is a family name. Manlove. My mother-in-law’s embarrassing middle name at school.

MANLOVE’S THREAD FOR IRISH LACE 200 Yds
S. Manlove and Sons Ltd. 
Manchester.

Inside the box are four wooden reels with peeling labels. Each has a tiny hand-written inscription in black ink:

Daisy. for one handkerchief. nov. 6. 1917
Joyce for 1 hcf. 
Sylvia. 1. hndkrchf. 

The writing is different on each, Sylvia has a curly f.  - as tiny as the stitches of the crochet chain.
Over a hundred years ago, before the end of the First World War, these ladies were gently trying to stitch the world back together. 

Opening the box to include it as part of an installation using found textiles, I find the amber shellac residue of a tiny exuded chrysalis striking out of one of the reels. The chrysalis is on Joyce, who had completed over a foot of handworked edging. 

This careful work is insect-like. Patient, repetitive, rhythmic, thorough. Each chain a base in which something can be built. 

Packing away, I find the body of the moth, long, gold, dusty, there all along - never escaped from the box.
…………….
September
The fashion professor’s husband is showing me around the garden, tomatoes in the greenhouse, progress in the vegetable beds, the wildflower patch. All the while I am distracted by a dangling case-bearer, Tinea pellionella, bred between the ridges of his knitted beanie hat, revolving gently on a thread behind his left ear.

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White Holes

June

Above the constant trundle of lorries from Bulgaria and Poland people in billowing saris and white trainers photograph themselves on the cliffs over the port. Their phones intermittently welcome them to France. 

On the clifftop you can find Five-spot Burnet moths, peregrine falcons and the conical spikes of pyramidal orchids. Once I saw a rare Dark Green Fritillary butterfly as I climbed down the steep ladder nailed into the chalk to the wreck below. 

The fields near St. Margaret’s Bay have become vineyards. Champagne country.

Beyond the traffic which funnels through Dover ignoring the town, the chalk valleys are surprisingly close. In a quarter of an hour you can be up on Lydden Down, among the flowers of the chalk. Sheeps’ Fescue, Bird’s foot Trefoil, Horseshoe Vetch. The close-cropped, hoof rutted slopes feed colonies of blue butterflies, such as the nationally vulnerable Chalkhill Blue. 

This species has developed a symbiotic relationship with yellow meadow ants, who hide the chrysalis in their chambers to pupate, and feed on the honeydew it secretes in return. Adonis blue caterpillars are tended in turn by red ants who, it is thought, bury them at night in small groups, to keep them warm and away from predators.
…………………….
Dover is the opposite to the White Holes of Skye. Kent has the most species of rare moths in the UK, and many new records of visiting species are recorded here, as the winds of the continent assist their passage. The map of arrivals in the Atlas is so tantalising - all those dots along the coast. ‘Suspected migrant’ it often says.

I have not yet seen the boats. 

In my cousin’s garden I am indulged in running a moth trap. The family is bemused; the middle son intrigued. The haul is impressive. We identify 26 species including the strange trapezoid log that is the Wax moth, which lives inside beehives and is adapting to digest plastic bags. But the highlight for me is a strange, small splinter of a micro-moth with a bright pink streak down the side of its body, and a comically huge yellow-green eye. Oncocera Semirubella is nationally scarce, and only to be found near limestone cliffs where the trefoil and white clover grow. Another example of the genius locus of this place. Mineral, microbe, plant, moth, bird, human.

Border Force. They can’t really talk about what they do. Vague comments about convoluted data protocols and impossible information targets. (How do you set goals for what you have not yet found? Line up here if you are carrying drugs, over here if it's skinny brown adolescents.) I want to know, but cannot ask what they feel about the wrinkled rubber dinghies, sloughed off like old skin on the shore. Eclosed, emerged, imago. Made it. 

Aycliffe. The council estate on the edge of the town, where the migrants are said to head for, climbing up a steep path from Shakespeare beach. Really though, they head for the much wider beaches of Romney marsh and the Aycliffe ones are more likely to have jumped from a lorry and found themselves in a cul-de-sac.

Migration – the lure of a better future, some unfamiliar place where opportunities will be… more. And the trials along the way will be worth it, downpayments on this nebulous future. A reward earned. Sometimes the gamble pays off. But sometimes it is a dangerous illusion. Deprivation is what it is, disruption. The permanent unease of transplantation. There is no welcome, no safety on the other side. Just different kinds of suffering. 

But migration is the engine of evolution; you have to think of it in generational terms: plant the seed, form a bridge head, a place for future generations to build from. As the moths do: fly a little further, squeeze another brood in, try again. Eventually, one might stick. In that sense, I am a survivor of the Irish potato famines.
…………………….

My cousin has moved house. He suggests I try out my moth-trap in his new proudly refurbished garden. I eye the tumbling, fecund railway bank beyond, but demur. The garden is a sterile wasteland; mature trees and neglected shrubs ripped out and replaced by new turf, patio slabs and a single, forlorn water lily in the pond. 

A skeletal brown man with no shoes is asleep in the bus shelter opposite the house.

Back in London a few days later I identify a small yellow micro-moth on the roof of my house. I thought Bisigna procerella would be too rare to have a vernacular name, but someone has called it the Kent Tubic. I send a photo to the County Recorder for confirmation, and the list-tickers kick in. “This is a first for Hackney!” (I live in Islington North.)

My record is entered in the Entomologist's Gazette. The County Recorder sends me the official log which states “first recorded in 1976 at Ham Street in East Kent …”

I write back to say that I had just driven back from Dover and perhaps the moth could have been transported with me somehow, clinging on to the side of the car? Nobody replies to this suggestion.