THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, February 16, 1995 TAG: 9502160382
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
If you're free at 2 p.m. Saturday, you'd do well to drop by the Norfolk Botanical Garden's auditorium, where vivid moths, some as large as your hand, will be discussed and depicted by Dr. Charles Covell Jr.
Covell's lecture, sponsored by the Virginia Butterfly Society, is open free to the public.
A professor at the University of Louisville, and the husband of a native Norfolkian, Betty Barnes, Covell authored the ``Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Moths.''
Two childhood friends in North Carolina interested him in collecting butterflies.
When he visited the Smithsonian Institution, curator William D. Field taught him how to label and pin specimens.
He majored in English at the University of North Carolina. It was in Norfolk, where Covell taught two years at Norfolk Academy, that his boyhood interest in insects revived to become his career.
He has pursued moths and butterflies throughout the United States, Latin America, Southeast Asia and New Guinea.
``What moth comes to mind now?'' the reporter asked.
Covell mentioned the huge Atlas moth of Malaysia. On each wing is a translucent ``window,'' a triangular bit of membrane without any cover, through which one can peer.
Hereabouts one may see the pale green luna moth, each moon-glow wing trailing a long tail. The cecropia moth also is striking.
Once, as a child, the reporter brought a cocoon indoors in winter; a lovely luna emerged on a spring evening. Flapping at the screen door, she attracted 16 male moths.
Covell said the male's feathery antennae pick up the female scent, the chemical pheromone, and come calling. Collectors hang a caged female from a limb to lure males.
Legendary headmaster J.B. Massie ``was the man who took a chance on me and gave me a job,'' Covell said Wednesday. He taught English and coached soccer from 1958 to 1960 at the Academy.
On the side, Covell helped naturalist Roger Rageot at the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, predecessor of the Chrysler Museum.
At Virginia Tech, encouraged by entomologist James M. Grayson, he earned master's and Ph.D. degrees.
His visit to Norfolk is, in a way, a return to the scene of a crime.
While he was teaching, he was night manager of a classical music radio station. Going home late one night, he noticed moths fluttering around lights at the entrance of a miniature golf course near Wards Corner.
The course was deserted, and Covell paused to snare moths. Such was the success that he stopped by the next night and had caught only a few when three policemen sprang out of the darkness and caught him.
They said he had been spotted the previous night.
``I showed them a couple of moths in my clammy little hands and was able to talk myself out of that one,'' he said.
His talk Saturday afternoon, ``Getting Familiar with Moths,'' will introduce the great breadth of some of their life cycles and habits. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
by CNB