Indian Moon Moth – Too drenched to fly

by | Jul 10, 2011 | Bandipur, India

Though most of the wildlife sanctuaries in India are closed during the monsoons, a few popular sanctuaries like Bandipur national park & Tadoba national park are open all year round. It is said that wildlife sightings are far and few during the monsoon season. However, we have always had our best wildlife experiences during the monsoons. We started our blog ‘Walk the Wilderness’ after one such wildlife experience and we haven’t looked back since then! Other memorable experiences during the monsoon include our best sighting of the Tiger in the Tadoba Wildlife Sanctuary and the sighting of a huge Tigerduring one of our trips to Bandipur.

This post is about a sighting of a different kind though. One evening just as we were stepping out of our cottage at Tusker Trails to go for dinner, we saw another guest photographing something under the lights. On closer inspection we noticed that he was photographing a beautiful, big Moth that he mentioned to be an Atlas Moth. It was indeed one of the biggest Moth we had ever seen and we clicked a few record shots.

Later when we checked the images we realized that the built-in flash did not help the quality of the images and we just hoped that we would get to see the Moth again. We were lucky as the very next day we found the same Moth perched on a tree in broad daylight. The reason this Moth, which is known to be active only during the night, was still there was because it was too drenched to fly, a result of the heavy downpour the previous night. This gave us an opportunity to photograph some frame filling compositions of this beautiful Moth. And only later we realized that it wasn’t the Atlas Moth, but the beautiful Indian Moon Moth also known as the Indian Luna Moth.