2020 in Numbers

Now that I'm up-to-date with records for 2020 and Peter Hall has kindly completed all the necessary dissections, here are a few statistics for this year from the garden at Westcott :

Number of nights traps were run (1st Jan to 30th Nov):  317, of which 118 were the actinic alone

    and 199 were actinic with MV

Number of species caught:  675 (345 micros, 330 macros)  

Nights with 100+ species:  11 (all using both traps, down from 19 in 2019 and 26 in 2018)

Best night for moth numbers:  16th July (1,020 moths of 114 species between the two traps); the

    best nights for species were 25th June and 11th August (134 on each night between the two traps)

    but the individual moth counts were lower than on 16th July 

Highest counts for a single species:  Lunar Underwing (2,758) for macros, Chrysoteuchia culmella

    (1,591) for micros

New for the site in 2020:  19 species, of which 16 were micros and three were macros (Lunar Hornet

    Moth, Toadflax Brocade and Cosmopolitan), site tally now 1,020 species 

Total number of moths caught in the garden (1st Jan to 30th Nov):  37,127 

Of the other macro species which generally put in really high counts, Common Footman (1,260) and Common Wainscot (1,297) each had their best ever year while Large Yellow Underwing (1,351), Square-spot Rustic (1,180) and Dark Arches (982) were all above the average even though it didn't seem like they were heading that way as the year progressed.  Only Setaceous Hebrew Character (636) was significantly below average.

It has to be said that thanks to COVID my garden trapping effort was higher than in the recent past because the number of nights on which both traps were used was up significantly.  I started running them both together in earnest at the beginning of April rather than from half way through May as is usually the case.  Not having analysed things thoroughly yet I'm unsure as to whether that extra effort early in the season was worthwhile, but it certainly is during the main summer period (May-August).  Having two traps to go through instead of one did give me more to do during the lockdown even if it wasn't that much!  The overall number of moths caught in 2020 was actually down to sensible levels after two really extraordinary years.  If you exclude 2018 and 2019, the number of species seen and the total number of moths caught were the highest ever here, so it has certainly been a good year at Westcott even if not an exceptional one.  

It would be nice to hear from anyone else who is able to comment yet on how their experiences in 2020 compare with previous seasons.  As the year progressed there seemed to be quite a lot of chatter on social media about how poor a year it was turning out to be but that wasn't borne out by the facts, here at least.

Dave Wilton Westcott, Bucks