Page 29 - Mothmageddon

JONATHAN BERLIAND & GRAHAM WARREN
“Each year, new health and safety regulations mean we have fewer chemical-based methods at our disposal,” she said in an interview in the charity’s magazine Heritage. “So, we have to be more inventive in our techniques. We now use pheromone traps that contain female sex hormones to attract male moths. The lures contain the equivalent of 1,000 female moths, so we catch a lot of deluded males!”
Amber Xavier-Rowe, head of collections conservation for English Heritage told The Guardian that a destructive species of clothes moth, Monopis sp. or the pale-backed clothes moth, has been discovered for the first time by the charity. It poses a real threat to precious curtains and carpets, costumes and tapestries in some of England’s most historic properties, she said. Conservators report the number caught in traps has doubled in the past five years.
“We’ve lost some modern furniture and furnishings, but so far we’ve kept on top of it with historic textiles by utter scrupulous diligence. Our curators are constantly on the lookout, and we have weekly, monthly and major annual conservation cleaning programmes – six-monthly in some properties.
“We really don’t know exactly why this is happening... It could be to do with the climate getting warmer, and it could be that we’re all just so busy we’re not cleaning at home as much.
“One possible source is chimneys – most of us have open fireplaces, but we don’t light as many fires, so we don’t get them cleaned as regularly. Moths love dead birds – the larvae eat the feathers, the skin and even the flesh. It’s very important to identify the source of an outbreak and then deal with it.”
She and other conservators have found that although the moths target textiles made from wool, fur or feathers, they will also attack other fabrics, particularly if they’re dirty.
When English Heritage took over Brodsworth Hall in South Yorkshire, for instance, it found moths had targeted the sweat-
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