This story was originally published in our Nov/Dec 2023 issue as "Moth to a Flame." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.
Robert Hoare first spotted the elusive Izatha psychra, an endangered moth in New Zealand, on a warm night in 2005. At the center of the country’s South Island, amid the fenced flats and sloping hills of the Pukaki Scientific Reserve, the entomologist erected a generator-powered light trap. Then, an hour before midnight — just as the generator’s fuel threatened to peter out and plunge everything into darkness — he glimpsed fluttering wings and a flash of gray.
Hoare is one of only a handful of people who can claim to have encountered the moth, as fewer than a dozen have ever been seen. All of these sightings occurred either in the dry shrublands and scrub of the Mackenzie District that encompasses the 79-acre reserve, ...
