Page 19 - Mothmageddon

JONATHAN BERLIAND & GRAHAM WARREN
are treated before they’re put in the wardrobe, the moths will start to breed.
(For tips on how to treat and care for charity and vintage shop clothes, see Chapter 4: How Vintage Clothing Puts Your Home at Risk.)
The rise of environmentally-friendly wool insulation is also contributing to the increase in moth infestations since it too provides ideal breeding and feeding conditions for moths.
Birds nests are also responsible, according to Savvas Othon, now Group Science and Innovation Director at Rentokil Initial. In an interview with the The Independent, Savvas said birds nests are often responsible for serious infestations.4
That’s bad news if you have a house covered in ivy or with eaves or a loft that provides a nesting site for birds. That’s because birds nests provide a perfect breeding site for the case-bearing carpet moth, Tinea pellionella. These are the tiny but enormously destructive and hard to exterminate native moth species that happily eat wool carpets.5
Their original habitat is outdoors, where they live in bird’s nests or on discarded fur or animal skin.
Once inside your home, the moths then travel down heating pipes and strike out, starting secondary infestations in airing cupboards, wardrobes and under-stairs storage.
4 ‘Lock up your cashmere!’, Rushton, Susie, The Independent, www.independent.co.uk, July 16, 2007
5 ‘The curious case of the case-bearing carpet moth’, Brown, Paul, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com, January 24, 2016
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