A lot of moths and butterflies engage in “puddling”- they land on water, manure or rotting fruit to feed.
Others, the so called vampire moths, feed on vertebrate blood.
And a few flying friends, visit the eyes of mammals or reptiles to drink fluids that provide essential moisture and nutrients.
Scientists call this Lachryphagy (literally: ‘tear-feeding’) and the behaviour has a poetic layer to it, that Rebecca Solnit touches on so very beautifully in her book ‘The Faraway Nearby’:
“Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds.
The birds sleep on, inadvertent givers.
The moths fly on, enriched.
We feed on sorrows, on stories, on the spaciousness they open up when they let us travel in our imagination beyond our own limits, when they dissolve the boundaries that confine us and urge us to extend the potentialities of our imperfect, broken, incomplete selves.
Those apricots my brother brought me in three big cardboard boxes long ago, were they tears too?
And this book, is it tears?
Who drinks your tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?”
Footage by Leandro João Carneiro de Lima Moraes, Carlos de la Rosa and Phil Torres
Music by J Mascis + The Fog
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