January Challenge - final table

Hello Moth-ers,

The January challenge has now finished, the data is all in and has been collated into the two charts below.

This year 13 moth-ers took part (five of those were from 'out of county' recorders), which considering the wet and cool January is not a bad turnout. However, despite the adverse conditions, between us we did manage to record 25 species, which is only three species down on last years number. There were 17 macro and 8 micro species recorded which resulted in 336 moths (320 macro and 16 micro), which is an excellent effort on everyone's part.

Only two of us achieved the macro part of the challenge, with 10 plus species they were, Alec Undril (an Essex recorder) with 12 species and Peter Williams just scraping home with 10 specie. Alan Sibley (an Essex recorder) and Sue Southam managed joint third place with 7 species. This year nobody managed to achieve the micro part of the challenge. The best return was 4 species from Alec Undril, so bad luck to him for Judy missing out. This was followed by Sue Southam and Peter Williams, each with 3 species. 

Now for a more in depth breakdown of what was recorded.

                                                                                                                                                                      Macros - As can be seen in the chart above, five of us managed to record 4+ species. Across all recorders the most numerous species was the Chestnut with 75 moths, followed by the Winter Moth with 67 moths and in third place was the Spring Usher with 42 moths

The most moths recorded by individual recorders were 110 by Peter Williams, 91 by Alec Undril and 67 by Sue Southam.

There weren't any unexpected or unusual species recorded this year, but it was good to get 2 records of overwintering species of 10 Herald and a single Tissue from Rob Goodsell from his site which contains a cave.

Micros - were very thin on the ground this year, with only 8 species recorded. There weren't really any unexpected micro species recorded. 

The chart below shows the top five macro species recorded (along with the total of moths) from 2012 to 2021

 

Which just leaves me to say a big thank you to all those who took part and please don’t forget, that apart from the fun and the individual challenge, it also generates much needed winter records for your county, which are always very thin on the ground - hopefully more of you will want to join in next year to see if you can grapple with the ‘January challenge’.

Peter.