Why Feralia?

Or: what's in a name ... and a blog

Welcome to all my new readers of the past few weeks! I reached 175 subscribers today, which tickles me absolutely pink. I’m delighted to have connected with so many people interested in moths and hope you enjoy reading my posts.

My birthday is this week, and in a couple more weeks it’s the 6-month mark for my Substack blog-newsletter, Feralia. Six months already! My blog dashboard says this will be my 45th post, which also seems hard to believe, considering I felt a little worried at the outset about finding enough moth-focused material to write about.

So in celebration and recognition of these milestones, I thought I’d share a little about my inspiration and motivation behind this blog - that is, why Feralia?

My husband discovered this moth hanging out on the back of our house yesterday. Some of you may recognize it as a member of the blog’s namesake genus, Feralia. In this case, the moth is Feralia jocosa, the Joker. (The logo for the blog, and the photo at the top of this post, is a related species, Feralia comstocki, Comstock’s Sallow, our most common Feralia species here at this house.)

I love the Feralia sallows. Green moths are always among my favourites at the sheet, no matter how big or small. There’s just something about the colour, which is relatively unusual in lepidoptera, I would argue even more so than pink (another colour I love in moths). Many of them, such as this genus, are patterned to camouflage against lichen. These guys are satisfyingly large, and arrive in the early spring just as mothing is starting to ramp up - like an old friend, returning to help kick off the party.

Or presenting itself as a birthday gift, perhaps! The timing of this one, voluntarily showing up on the side of the house, is fun. It’s the first of 2026 for me. I get a few Feralia sallows every year, though never in any great numbers.

So how did I decide on Feralia for my Substack blog name?

Well, going back a year prior … I had been wanting to shorten my iNaturalist handle for a while. When I signed up to the platform I had used my full name, but typing out seabrookeleckie every time I needed to sign in got tiresome. Plus it was boring. Looking for something shorter and with more character, I took inspiration from iNaturalist user neoarctia - Chris Schmidt, a moth expert at the Canadian National Collection of Insects in Ottawa, who is active on iNat making identifications for folks. The Neoarctia are a genus of tiger moths, one of Chris’ particular areas of specialty. (Or I should say, was a genus of tiger moths - they’ve been reassigned into genus Chelis and Neoarctia is no more.) I love the Feralia moths, and liked the sound of the name Feralia, so changed my username to that.

When I began setting up my Substack, there was the question of what to call it. I didn’t have to spend much time thinking about it. I was already Feralia over at iNaturalist, and it was a unique and memorable name for an online blog space. It also made for an easy and recognizable logo. (And shop merchandise - I have a few print-on-demand mugs and wearable items on my website, if you’re interested in supporting me through moth merch. 😉 )

Major Sallow, F. major, the third of our three Feralia species here

And why Substack?

Honestly, I missed blogging. I wrote a blog for a few years, till 2013-ish, about nature stuff around our house and occasional life updates. We had many acres to explore at the house we lived at then, and I loved discovering stuff and sharing it with people. I ended up getting busy with field guides and, later, kids, and stopped writing. I think this sort of thing happens to a lot of people through their 30s, or at least those with young families.

My kids are in school now, and the third and most work-intensive field guide is behind me, and I thought it was a good time to try returning to sharing stuff with other naturephiles. I experimented briefly with other platforms - Instagram, YouTube - but the formats just didn’t feel right. I like to write, and like to read, and blogging felt like the best fit for me. The old blogs of yore seem to be mostly relics these days, but essay-based community platforms like Substack, Medium, etc, are thriving. And so here I am.

Another Major Sallow, this one unusually pale.

And why moths?

This seems pretty obvious, of course - I wrote/co-authored three field guides to moths. What else would I write about?

Well, nature, like I did on my old blog. I enjoyed sharing my various nature observations over the years I was posting to my old blog, and I’m sure I’ll still tangentially pull in general nature stuff from time to time here. But there are lots of people writing about nature, and many of them with much more insight or poeticism than I’d be able to offer.

Some of these nature writers will do a post now and then about moths, but no one seems to be focused just on this group - at least, not that I’ve come across yet. Between my own mothing, identification walk-throughs, and other bits of research I came across, I figured I could probably find enough stuff to talk about to fill up a whole blog about moths without getting too repetitive.

But besides the practical side of my reasoning, I also just wanted to share all the fun and interesting things I find and learn about moths. In a moth-dedicated blog, I can ramble to my heart’s content, share esoteric bits of information that intrigue me, and enthuse about the various moths that visit my lights over the warm moths. My family are very patient with listening to me, but I know you - all my Substack subscribers - are here for the moths and genuinely want to hear it all. I’m very grateful for that. My family are grateful for that, too. 😄

The Joker, F. jocosa, again - this time in a rare brown morph.

So, a thank you to all my new followers, and a big thank you to all of you who have been here from the start and engaged with this new blog venture! I’ve really been enjoying myself. I hope you’ve been enjoying it, too.