My moth year begins!

Yes, at last, my moth year begins with this lovely little moth found in the firewood shack at the bottom of the garden, Agonopterix yeatiana. A micro-moth of about 1cm in length usually found near the coast, but frequent all year. 

Agonopterix yeatiana

So, the first one for Suffolk according to the table. Lets hope there are many, many more to come :)

Happy New Year from Bucks.

My Garden Mothing Year has finally got underway, with the first moths in my trap since 1st Nov. I have been doing a regular trap in a local woodland as well, which has produced a few moths, but they don't count here.
But I hope my "in the house" moths do count, so that I'm not just listing the one species!

Here we go:

1) Twenty-plume Moth
2) Brown House Moth
3) White-shoulderd House Moth
4) Chestnut

2013 Whetstone Update

Back in this post I included a garden first record of a Biselachista sp. that I suspected would be a VC55 first record of Biselachista utonella. Whilst I don't keep a personal collection of set specimens, I will retain moths that really need a gen det to confirm and this one was duly kept in the fridge. It has now been done by Jon Clifton (I can't really do critical micro dets) who has confirmed my ID. Yet another confirmed VC55 first micro from my really very ordinary and quite small suburban garden!

Spluttering to a start

No photo available, but we had an Acleris schalleriana on an indoor wall on 10th January, bringing our 2014 list to a grand total of one. Ironically, if it had turned up on the wall eleven days earlier, it would have brought up our 400 for the year for 2013: we didn't have a record of it last year. Ah well, maybe this year... We haven't yet bothered putting out the trap this month; we may at some point if there's a night which manages to combine being fairly warm with not featuring torrential rain.

Not Rushing

I see that there are already scores on the doors for 2014. I will get started some time, but for the moment I remain mothless. I am entirely unsurprised by this though. This will be my 15th full year of trapping in the garden, and in the preceding 14 years I've only recorded a total of 14 individuals of 7 species. In fact that stat would be even poorer if it wasn't for an unprecedented mild spell in January 2011, when I recorded 7 individuals of 5 species including my only garden record to date of Mottled Umber. I will only be concerned if I am stuck on zero at the end of Feb!

 Mottled Umber, 13/01/2011

On the way:)

I have not yet had the trap going but found 2 moths in the porch yesterday.
Early Moth

Mottled Umber

Please update my total to 2 ;) Tristan.
Cheers

The Garden Moth Challenge 2014 begins :-)

A huge thank you to everyone who has taken part in the Garden Moth Challenge 2013. It has been a great project with far more contributors than we expected. It is great to see that there is such an active moth'ing community out there!

Everyone who took part deserves some kudos as moths and lepidoptera are quite a challenging group of insects :-)

Wrapping up on last years event I have been amazed with the amount of species participants have recorded in their garden. I exceeded all expectation in my garden, that is for sure! So here is the amazing tallies of the top three challengers:

1. 537 species Les Hill (Dorset)
2. 504 species Lionel Burgess (Bedfordshire)
3. 464 species Andy Musgrove (Norfolk)   

Huge congratulations to everyone!

So now to to 2014! We are running the challenge again in the same format. Maybe next year we will look at a points system but this year we will keep it simple again! I hope we can exceed last years number of participants; remeber this challenge is open to anyone no matter where you live in the world!

For last years participants who want to take up the challenge again; just send your updates via the comments on the 'Latest Scores' page. For new participants, please email me your name and county that you run your trap in to tristan 'at' theinkednaturalist dot co dot uk.

You can check out the rules here:  http://gardenmothchallenge.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-rules.html

If you are a twitter user, you can join our community by using the hashtag #teammoth (don't forget to follow me on @inkednaturalist)!

Welcome to Moth Club!