You may remember that last September we were delighted to welcome Mary, the Moth Recorder for Butterfly Conservation in this area, to a moth survey. We were pleased that Mary came along to this survey and joined our 5 group members. We put out 3 different moth traps in 2 locations in Birch Drive. At our last attempt a couple of months ago, due to poor weather conditions, we only collected 3 moths in total. We weren’t holding out much hope for overnight from the 24th into the 25th as there was a really strong wind and rain was forecast. Things moths don’t like.

Process

Part of the process of setting up the traps was to place egg box bases in the traps – this gives the moths something to rest on while they are in the trap. They can also crawl down between the eggboxes and hide away. We put out the moth traps in the early evening, and then switched them on at approximately 10pm. They were left all night and then just before 6am we switched off the lights and covered the moth traps with blankets & towels. That was when our hopes started to rise as we saw movement in one of the traps. At 9am we started removing the eggboxes.

Success 👏✔️⭐💯🥇🏆

As soon as we started removing the egg boxes we were finding moths. It was when we moved onto the large trap things just got a bit manic. As we were taking the egg boxes out off that trap we were finding loads of moths on every egg box. On some there were 4 on the top but when we’d look underneath there were another 5! We were delighted that Mary was there to do the identification. Then, as the morning progressed the moths were getting quite impatient and some were flying off before we had a chance to count or identify them. Also, there were several micromoths which we didn’t count.  For the trap at our first location we counted 31 moths split over 15 species.  The second location had the advantage of 2 traps in slightly different areas and we collected 191 moths split over 40 species. So in total over 200 moths and over 50 species, which we were delighted with.

Moths Everywhere

Once we identified the moths on each eggbox we carefully transferred them onto an area of wildflowers. Except, some of the moths had other ideas 😲. They decided our clothes were much better than the plants. Every now and again we’d hear someone saying “you’ve got a moth on your jacket”. We also found it wasn’t a good idea to let the moths climb over our hands – they didn’t want to leave. After a good couple of hours we finished going through all the traps.

Some Real Beauties

Too often we think of moths as being quite boring and very dull compared to butterflies. Well that was certainly not the case. We had all colours, shapes and sizes. In addition, they had some amazing patterns. If you look at some of the photos you will see how beautiful they are. I am including a link to the iNaturalist project where we recorded our findings – https://uk.inaturalist.org/projects/moth-count-july-2026?tab=observations

If you want to see all the items that have been recorded in the woodland you can find them on the following link – https://uk.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=209437

If you would like to see a list of all the moths recorded please click on the following link – Maryburgh Community Woodland 24 July 26 – For Website

 

We would like to thank Mary for a very enjoyable morning and are looking forward to running another session.

 

More Help Needed

More help is always needed to maintain and improve the woodland for the benefit of everyone in the community. If you cannot spare a couple of hours to join us for some fun in the woodland, why not help out in other ways. You can now make a donation using our PayPal online system. All donations will go to help with the future development of our community woodland.