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Friday 11 January 2013

Llandaff North in 2012


Now that it's turned cold, it seems a good time to look back at last year...

This is the summary from my garden for 2007 to 2012:

Year
Species
New species
Trap nights
Total moths
Moths per night
2007
188
188
62
1824
29.4
2008
198
67
60
1983
33.1
2009
225
59
78
2130
27.3
2010
257
52
63
2821
44.8
2011
302
68
108
4336
40.1
2012
260
25
100
3589
35.9

Unsurprisingly, given the generally awful weather, 2012 wasn't a great year for moths, with the number of species and total number of moths being down on 2011 despite similar amounts of trapping. In fact, I only caught 3 more species than in 2010 when I did a lot less trapping. 2012 appears less bad when compared with 2007-2009, but I think this is partly due to switching from a Skinner to a Robinson trap in 2010 (the Robinson does seem to hold more moths).

A few species had a record year, including Garden Carpet, Common Marbled Carpet, Common Emerald, Swallow-tailed, Cinnabar, Buff Ermine, Silver Y, Dot, Angle Shades, and of course Light Brown Apple Moth. Far more species did poorly, particularly badly hit were many of the noctuids, including Vine's Rustic, Straw Dot, Setaceous Hebrew Character, Lesser BBYU, Flame Shoulder and Shuttle-shaped Dart.

Despite all the doom and gloom, 25 species were added to the garden list, 12 of them macros.

I'd be interested to hear how others got on. I'm sure we're all hoping for better moth weather in 2013...

9 comments:

  1. I don't know where you find the time to do this sort of thing, George. Anyway, your total for 2012 certainly makes my total of 679 look paltry.

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  2. Hi Mark,

    It's quite quick really - most of the numbers come from standard MapMate queries. I might be sad, but not sad enough to spend hours on this kind of thing!

    George

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    Replies
    1. Not sad, George. When you've spent most of your spare time for the past three months, square bashing a fungus, you really know the meaning of sad!
      Did you work out the new species numbers using MapMate queries too?

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  4. Yes there's a standard query for that. It's in the "Species 'new or absent'" menu and the query is "New species in year at site".

    George

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  5. Thanks, George. I've just tried that with 2012 and the results have highlighted a possible problem with the species list for my garden. I have, over the years, had Carcina quercana a few times in the garden, and the records have been submitted, but according to MapMate, it was new to my garden in 2012. I shall have to look into that.

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  6. Well what do you know? It's not a problem with the MapMate list after all, but a major malfunction of the user's brain. Trawling through my old paper records, it seems that the first time Carcina quercana was recorded in my garden was indeed in 2012. Amazing!

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  7. That must be a relief Mark. I've had that sinking feeling before, when records I thought were on MapMate have gone missing.

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  8. Know the feeling. Back in November, a conversation with Mike Hogan brought to light the fact that my birds checklist was out of date, despite me having all the patches replicated. It turned out that when replicating patches and syncs, it was going through the motions but not actually replicating the data into my system. A whole year's worth of other peoples data was missing and a mass of patches hadn't been replicated.
    In early December, I took my PC (a desktop!) down to Cardiff, for Dave to sort things out, which he did and everything now seems to be working fine, but in the back of the mind there is still that nagging doubt the results, when running queries.

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