Boy wonder

Issue 200

Solar power
Horses of Huntly
Forget me not
Whaling
Red admirals

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Southern sights

Dunedin, late autumn. Our headlamps piece together a storybook world: flowerpots and a bathtub full of brassicas; a bike leaning against a fence; a wooden gate beneath which Peter Rabbit might slip at any moment. A frost is gathering, our breath plumes of steam in the cold air. I’m with 11-year-old Luca Nikkel in the garden of the Sawyers Bay cottage he and his parents call home. Up the hill is a stand of regenerating bush, so moths are usually plentiful here.

Luca has three moth traps set up—white sheets, pegged out and illuminated by ultraviolet lamps. At the base of each, a funnel set in a bucket captures any falling insect.

My timing’s not good. It’s the worst time of year to go mothing, and the traps are quiet. Moths only live for a few months. Most will be dead now, their caterpillars hiding away. The clear night doesn’t help either—moths like cloud cover. On a warm, overcast night, Luca can collect hundreds of moths. Then, he’s busy sorting and identifying them. You gently blow on a moth, he tells me, to get it to flatten its wings, revealing spectacular patterns. On a good night, he might find 40 different species in his traps. He photographs them, then releases them unharmed. “They’re just amazing creatures,” he tells me. “They’re really, really beautiful.”

Few New Zealanders, says Luca, appreciate our stunning moths; almost 2000 species, most of which are found nowhere else on Earth. Many are thought to be in decline due to habitat loss, pesticides and light pollution. It’s likely moths are very important pollinators for native plants. It’s certain they’re vastly under-researched.

Luca’s father, Andrew, is a photographer. It was he who first handed his son an old camera to play with. “I remember it being a pretty quick transition,” says Andrew, “to, now, Luca’s in the garden looking for insects with the camera every day.” His photos are extraordinary, capturing the moths’ wild and woolly hairdos, the expressive eyes and manic wing patterns of insects most of us observe only as squashed matter on our car windshields. Six years ago, his photograph of Hierodoris stellata, uploaded to iNaturalist, attracted a flood of comments—it was the first time in decades the moth had been recorded. Luca was five at the time. Since then, he has identified 300 species in his own garden, some undescribed by science.

While moths are scarce tonight, he finds plenty of other invertebrates to show me: wētā poised on tree trunks; leaf-veined slugs oozing up a wooden fence; a cluster of native parasitic wasps. In a kōwhai, he spots the patterns of a leafminer, a “micro-moth”, the caterpillar of which leaves a convoluted trail as it eats. None of this is new to Luca, but each find brings a gasp of excitement. He photographs all of it.

What makes a good entomologist? “You have to want to stay up late,” he says, “and you also need some patience.”

It helps to have the family on board. “We’ve been so lucky,” says Luca’s mother, Gina Rocco, “because we’ve been able to learn as he’s learned. We just feel grateful to have a kid that wants to be outdoors, and so into nature.”

Luca attends the local Rudolf Steiner school and juggles a swarm of other interests including drama, art, music and filmmaking. His director credits include The Magic Portal and Super Bob vs the Evil Drone. These epics were filmed on a neighbouring property—which is also, incidentally, prime mothing habitat.

Family trips away, says Gina, are “all about mothing”. Six months ago, near a beech forest in Lewis Pass, Luca made an extraordinary discovery. In one of the traps was a large moth with brilliant orange underwings. It reminded him of something he’d heard whisper of—Pseudocoremia campbelli, a moth that hadn’t been recorded in New Zealand since 1924. “Somehow the name flashed through my brain when I saw it,” he says, “but I didn’t really think it was a possibility.”

The next morning, however, he uploaded a photo of the mystery moth to iNaturalist and to his joy soon had confirmation—P. campbelli was back from the dead. Robert Hoare, one of New Zealand’s leading entomologists, helped confirm the ID, calling Luca’s find an “astonishingly supreme rarity”. No such luck tonight. We find only one moth, and a common Australian one at that. Eventually, the cold chases us inside, where I sit down with Luca in front of the family computer. He’s made almost 20,000 observations on iNaturalist, covering some 1800 species. The site, Gina tells me, has also become an important space for Luca to expand his knowledge and his community.

Recently, he took traps to a school camp and got some of his classmates interested in the hobby. He’s also been running mothing events in the community, while his photography has been winning awards. For well-known moth advocate Barbara Anderson, who’s been a mentor, Luca represents a crucial link between the past and future. “There just aren’t enough lepidopterists in the country, and the ones that are there are ageing,” she says. “Luca’s really keen to learn things, he’s really observant. Everything he learns, he wants to share. He wants other people to be as excited as he is. You can see that in the photographs he takes.”

For Luca, it all comes back to the insects themselves. “Everyone should be aware of how amazing moths are,” he says, “so they can protect them.”