Tuesday, 8 December 2020

2020 in numbers Sibford North Oxfordshire

 Using Dave Wilton's format here are my 2020 results

Number of nights traps were run (1st Jan to 30th Nov):  195, of which 125 were 125w MV and 70 were 20w Black light (mainly in the Winter months.)  Only one trap was run on any one night.

Number of species caught:  516 (232 micros, 284 macros)  

Nights with 100+ species:  2 (4 in 2019 and 1 in 2018)

Best night for moth numbers:  14th August (474 moths of 68 species); the best nights for species were 25th June and 7th August (102 and 100 respectively) but the individual moth counts were lower than on 14th August 

Highest counts for a single species:  Common Wainscot (869) for macros, Chrysoteuchia culmella   (463) for micros

New for the site in 2020:  73 species, of which 55 were micros (including Agnoea flavifrontella, Ectoedemia decentella, Ethmia bipunctella, Haplotinea insectella and Mompha langiella and 18 were macros (including Blossom Underwing, Cypress Carpet, Netted Pug and Scarce Tissue) site tally now 650 species 

Total number of moths caught in the garden (1st Jan to 30th Nov):  16,293

Species numbers were up considerably compared to 2019 although despite increased trapping effort overall numbers were very slightly down. The most notable difference was Dark Arches where only about one third of the number caught in 2019 were recorded. Common Footman and Common Wainscot both had a remarkably good year here as well.

The increased number of species recorded was helped considerably by Peter Hall’s efforts in splitting some of the aggregate species and identifying many of the smaller micros that I had taken more time to search for in the midge dust at the bottom of the trap.

Andy Newbold, Sibford Ferris, Oxon.


1 comment:

  1. Indeed, that strikes me as being a good number of species for the amount of trapping effort. It is definitely worth searching through the debris at the bottom of the trap!

    Re Dark Arches, 2019 was an absolutely exceptional year for it at Westcott (3,936 individuals) but this year's count (982) still beat the previous high of 909 in 2015.

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