The January challenge has now finished, the data is all in and has been collated into the two charts below.
This year 12 moth-ers took part (one of those was an 'out of county' recorder), one recorder less than last year which was rather disappointing. The month started with very mild conditions and promised much, however conditions soon reverted to a more normal January and thereafter we all rather struggled. Only 21 species were recorded (a drop from the record number of 25 recorded in 2021). There were 13 macro and 9 micro species recorded, which resulted in 254 moths (336 last year), 236 macro and 18 micro), which, considering the adverse weather was an excellent effort on everyone's part.
Only one of us achieved the macro part of the challenge, with 10 plus species and that was myself (peter Williams), with just managing to get the ten species, recording the tenth species an Early Moth on the 28th. just a few days before the challenge finished. Sue Southam finished second with 6 species and daisy Dunn was third with 5 species. This year nobody managed to achieve the micro part of the challenge. The best return was 3 species from Peter Williams.
Now for a more in depth breakdown of what was recorded.
Macros - As can be seen in the chart above, only five of us managed to record 4+ species. Across all recorders the most numerous species was the Mottled Grey with 98 moths, followed by Umber Umber with 40 moths and in third place was the Winter Moths with 25 moths
The most moths recorded by individual recorders were 170 by Peter Williams, 25 by Sue Southam and 14 by Alan Sibley.
There weren't really any unexpected or unusual species recorded this year, apart from an Oak Nycteoline seen in the house by Julie Pearce and Mark Thomas.
Micros - were very thin on the ground this year, with only 9 species recorded (actually one more than last year). 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 2022.
