As expected the count of orchid flowers in January took much long then in the last months. And just out of curiosity we did it twice within 14 days to see how quickly the numbers are changing. The difference between the counts is actually impressive, so that we are thinking that we need to increase the number of counts per month to get adequate results (wouldn't that be a cool job for a volunteers!). Since we are still working on the exact methodology this is not problematic though. For tomorrow we expect the visit of an orchid specialist who can hopefully help us with some uncertain identifications.
The highest flower count this month had Stelis striolata with almost 2.000 flowers, followed by two other species of the Stelis genus (where we are not yet sure which ones those exactly are) with 500 and 700 flowers respectively.
As for species numbers: we found 26 species in flower in January compared to around 13 in December.
