Renaissance

It's easy to get beaten down by the constant barrage of bad news.

This effect is amplified if you, like me, suffer from anxiety and depression on good days.  All I have to do is spend a while reading the headlines, or (worse) hanging out on social media, and I start catastrophizing.  Everything is awful.  The bad guys always win.  We're all doomed.

I can spiral down that whirlpool really quickly, while at the same time knowing that it's not true.  A wise friend once told me, "The biggest lie that depression tells you is that the lows are permanent."  Yes, there are some very bad things happening right now.  But it is possible to hold that in your mind at the same time as believing there's still hope for the future.  I can agree with Martin Luther King Jr.'s eloquent line, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," and still wish it would bend a hell of a lot faster.

It's why I post here every day, and (mostly) focus on the positive, or at least the intriguing, rather than writing about the current political horror show day after day.  I do believe in speaking up for truth, fairness, and compassion, and decrying their opposites -- and I have done.  But I've found that it's equally important to find things that give us hope.  There is good news out there, and people are still doing lovely, kind, interesting, important, and wonderful things.

Sometimes those little sparks of hope come from odd quarters.  Which brings us to the Dover Twist.

It sounds like some sort of obscure English country dance, but it's not.  It's a species of moth native to southern England, Periclepsis cinctana, a little brown-and-white creature with a wingspan of only a bit over a centimeter.

It's an extreme habitat specialist, requiring chalk grasslands, which have largely been cleared for building.  And as we've seen over and over, when conditions change -- especially with human disturbance -- the specialists always get hit first and hardest.

So it was with the Dover Twist.  Although related populations still persist in mainland Europe, and a small relic on the island of Tiree off the northwest coast of Scotland, the last individual in its original habitat of southeastern England was seen in 1953.  Attempts to relocate it failed, and it was declared extirpated.

Until a couple of months ago, when conservation ecologist Rebecca Levey discovered a thriving population of them on a downland in Lydden Temple Ewell Nature Reserve, northwest of Dover.

"I was absolutely blown away," Levey said.  "It's the kind of discovery you dream of making, but you never expect it to actually happen.  With so many butterflies and moths in trouble across the UK, it’s fantastic to find this tiny little species bucking the trend.  After a 73 year gap in sightings, I'm so pleased to share that we now know it is still in Kent and I'm sure it'll be keeping me busy in the near future as we begin the task of uncovering the exact habitat it needs as part of Butterfly Conservation's work helping to save our most threatened moths."

The unexpected renaissance of this species is not only lovely news in general, but gives hope that some other species thought extinct -- especially ones like the Thylacine and Ivory-billed Woodpecker, that live(d) in remote and poorly-explored regions -- might still persist.  (Both of those, in fact, have been the subject of repeated sighting reports, but thus far, nothing that convinces the skeptics.  The search continues.)

I'm not sure why this story cheered me up as much as it did.  The Dover Twist is certainly not what my ecology professor called one of the "charismatic megafauna," something that'd be likely to end up featured in a calendar entitled "Majestic Wildlife."  But that this little insect survived undetected, virtually under our noses, is a symbol that things can turn out well.

The good guys do win sometimes.  Even if in this case, the good guys are a British ecologist and a minuscule brown-and-white moth.  Maybe it's not a dramatic victory, the kind that would make headlines, but it does give me a little boost of hope.

And this morning, that's enough to go on.

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