Now that that the challenged is over, I've collated all the received records into the charts below. After Peter Williams asked me to run the challenge, I decided to open it to recorders in my home county of Staffordshire, and to Shropshire, our mutual neighbours.
Last year there were 12 participants, all but one from Montgomeryshire. This year there were again 12 participants: 5 from Montgomeryshire, 4 from Staffordshire, 2 from Shropshire and 1 from Northamptonshire.
The weather conditions seemed to have deterred either the recorders or the moths, or perhaps both; 21 species were recorded (12 macro and 9 micro), which is the same as last year, but there were only 126 individual macro-moths recorded this year compared to 236 the previous year, and 12 micro-moths (18 last year.
Only one person completed the macro part of the challenge, and this was Peter Williams with 11 species. Sue Southam was runner-up with 6 species. As in previous years, no one managed to record 5 micro-moth species, the best results being a tie between Peter and Sue with 3 species each.
This chart shows the collated data.
Now for a more detailed breakdown of the results:
Mottled Umber was the most numerous species recorded with 35 individuals, followed by Winter Moth (23) then Mottled Grey (16). The highest number of moths recorded was 89 by Peter Williams, down from his 170 last year; second most was by Sue Southam with 13, down from 25 last year. As to be expected, micro-moths were once again quite scarce with just 13 individuals of 9 species.
The next chart shows the top 5 moths recorded during the January challenge since 2012.
