In order to improve the efficiency of the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) swarm in cooperative search for moving targets, a UAV swarm cooperative search method was proposed on the basis of the moth pheromone courtship mechanism. According to the courtship behavior of moth in choosing flight direction by pheromone, a wind direction model in pheromone map and a moth pheromone courtship model were established. Considering the constraint of collision avoidance between UAV swarm, a map from moth pheromone courtship mechanism to UAV swarm distributed cooperative search was proposed, and the specific implementation process was given. Simulation results show the effectiveness and stability of the proposed method in solving the cooperative search problem of single moving target, and the outdoor flight experimental results verified the feasibility of the proposed method in practice.