Tiny pink moths often dart around my garden, taking a special liking to the blue salvia.

They are no bigger than a minute, I have to look hard to see them and have never been able to get a photo of the little jitterbugs. I have always just called them “pink moths,” knowing nothing about them, except they are obviously pink.

Turns out that southern pink moth really is their common name, according to two insect loving friends, Maurice Cullen, an insect expert and mastermind behind the Virginia Beach Middle School Butterfly Garden, and Robert Brown, a really good insect photographer.

In Robert’s photo, the little moth is pink, all right, and has big green eyes. Up close, it is pinker than I could have dreamed, and I had never even noticed their green eyes!

“It is actually common,” said Maurice who sees them at the butterfly garden. “It is so small that most people don’t take notice in that when it takes flight and lands, it slips quickly under a leaf.”

According to Maurice, the southern moth is a native here in Virginia and their caterpillars love to feed on salvia buds and blooms. They are in a category of caterpillars known as “budworms.”

“For some people they are so bad they just give up and stop growing salvia,” he said.

“Inornate pyrausta” is the pink moth’s Latin name, Robert noted.

“’Inornate’ means ‘unadorned’,” he said. “Seems to me that if you are that shade of pink with big green eyes, you wouldn’t need much ornamentation!”

It’s hard to believe that these little beauties, however small, are so difficult to see, but I bet if you look hard, you might have them in your yard too.

Palamedes butterfly update from Robert and Maurice:

Maurice raised this cute Palamedes caterpillar on sassafras leaves.

I had written last week that sassafras and red bay trees were host trees for the Palamedes caterpillars, and it always confounded me that, though I have lots of Palamedes in my yard, I have never seen a caterpillar on my sassafras.

Maurice said he also had only seen the caterpillars on red bay trees around here, never on sassafras. So, a couple of years ago, he experimented and raised some caterpillars on sassafras and some on red bay and was equally successful!

Those little caterpillars must be dining out of sight, way up high on the sassafras trees.

Wherever their caterpillars grew up, you won’t have any trouble seeing the big beauties. Palamedes recently were “large and plentiful” at False Cape State Park, Maurice said.

And the same was true at First Landing State Park, Robert said. “The Palamedes were our constant companions last Sunday along with bullfrogs and, unfortunately, mosquitos when he walked the Osprey Trail in the park.”