Reports are coming in from all over about the annual explosion in the winter-moth population.

As long as you're standing there, trying to figure out how to get in your house without bringing a ton of the bugs with you, why not count them and then fill out the annual survey by the Massachusetts Introduced Pests Outreach Project (since, yes, these things are not native, and only started showing up in the 1990s)?

Almost anybody who's had a porch lit after dark the past couple of days has gotten to see our annual infestation of male winter moths (for, as you recall, the female winter moths don't fly and just calmly wait their light-mad suitors).

The state is conducting a winter-moth survey to try to gauge the extent of these invasive pests.

Gah! Kidlet had to provide cover on the porch tonight when we came back from the supermarket - she had to fight the little buggers off as I opened the front door.

Pazzo Books in Roslindale is offering a $5 credit to the first person who brings in a female adult cankerworm.

You may know them better as winter moths - except that it's the males that fly around en masse in winter, since the females are wingless and pretty much sit around waiting to get serviced so that they can then pop out roughly 89 trillion gazillion bazillion eggs, all of which hatch in the spring and then commit suicide in our pool.