View from the North 40: It's an all-out invasion of erratic winged-flappers

The annual migration of miller moths is officially in full swing, and researchers at Colorado State University have said we should expect to see abundant numbers this year.

Unfortunately, their assessment is spot-on accurate.

One night this week I even had to abandon my office to escape repeated onslaughts from these gray-brown nuisances — my metal-handled swatter no longer able to bear the strain of our dual.

I could hear a few of them clamoring around the ceiling light that’s slightly behind and above my head when I sit at my desk. Their manic flapping was accentuated by the irregular thumping of their bodies as they failed to negotiate a landing or understand the concept of a ceiling. One finally widened its erratic flight pattern to spiral down into the light of my computer screen, only to rebound off the monitor and careen into my face, leaving splash of moth glitter thick enough to make me sneeze.

I watched it regain altitude to the light and realized I didn’t have a couple moths up there, it was six.

That’s when I armed myself with a bug swatter, smacking them out of the air so I wouldn’t wake my husband slapping the swatter on the ceiling. I thought I’d killed or fatally wounded them all, and went back to work. But no.

Soon enough I heard the flapping sound building again. After getting hit in the back of the head twice, I took up my weapon again, only to find their numbers had doubled. I laid waste to them again, I thought, but basically that scene repeated itself another six, eight, times. The only exception is that I just started flapping the swatter back and forth under the light, smacking as many moth bodies as I could until they cleared out to give a couple minutes peace.

Eventually, the temper in the swatter’s metal handle gave out. The wire was so soft that one swipe with the swatter would leave it bent at a 90-degree angle. I gave up and went to bed.

The thing is, I don’t even know how the millers get in.

I have screens on all my windows. My front door has a good, functional seal, and I don’t leave it open and unattended like an invitation for winged mayhem to flap its way in. And I certainly don’t see them coming inside with us. Their noisy, loopy, crash-dummy approach to flight would seem to be a dead giveaway if they were flying through the doorway at the same time we were passing through.

Surely, they would aim incorrectly, hit us in the back of the head, struggle spasmodically to get out of our hair, and with open air ahead, they would loop right back around to smack us in the face.

They must have some weird, recessive ninja trait that allows them to sneak through the thin air, seeping like smoke through undetectable holes in the defense. Then they emerge from their hidey-holes like a clown posse on psychedelic drugs spilling out of their little clown car — spinning, flipping, screaming in people’s faces and exploding glitter bombs overhead.

No one can understand what they’re doing or even track their movements, but if you weren’t afraid of clowns before this, you were after the invasion. And by clowns I mean millers.

Here’s the weird thing: They aren’t even from around here. That CSU article said that miller moths are an adult army cutworm. They come from along the western edge of the Mid-West, like western Kansas. The cutworm army of doom pops out of their eggs in the ground, they gorge on some crops, fall asleep from all the carbohydrates and wake up as, well, the horror-clown cousin of butterflies.

We get the millers because the first thing they do as adult bugs with a license to fly is decide to vacation in the Rocky Mountains to escape the oppressive heat of the plains. I don’t even know how they find the mountains with the way they fly and how easily they’re distracted by shiny lights. But somehow they get there then turn around and fly home again in September so the survivors can start the whole egg-laying process over again.

That’s right, miller moths are the worst tourists ever passing through the area. They only come into the house because they’re freeloaders thinking humans are running some kind of charity hostel for drunken, flight-challenged, ninja clowns.

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And they’ll be back in a few months at [email protected] .