Clevedon Wildlife

  What you carry is, very much, up to your plans for what you see. If you just want to enjoy seeing Hoverflies then you could just go without any kit at all. Or you could just take a notebook and jot down your sightings. Personally I have two main aims that heavily influence how laden I have become. These are to enjoy taking decent quality photographs and to record Hoverflies for posterity with the records being available to scientists, naturalists or others in the future. Having birded for nigh on 60 years I have a loft full of annual notebooks. Re-reading some early ones I realised that no-one else would be likely to plough through them so decided to change to mostly using electronic means. My choices are Ebird for birds and iRecord for insects. Mind you it was eye-opening to read a list where I walked to my nearby wood in the early 70s and simply recorded Turtle Dove as "abundant as usual".  Having said that I still use a notebook for listing what insects I am seeing in th...

                                        Black Lagoon Fly (Eristalinus sepulchralis) There are many resources available these days via the internet and I will just mention those that I use most regularly. Most days I have a look at the wonderful UKHoverflies facebook group. https://www.facebook.com/groups/609272232450940 This lets me see hundreds of photos of adult hoverflies which are identified by experts. As well as helping me familiarise myself with many species I also get a good idea as to what is flying currently. The most comprehensive selection of British Hoverfly photos imaginable can be seen at Steven Falk's Flickr pages with many photos each of nearly 300 species. https://www.flickr.com/photos/63075200@N07/collections/72157629600153789/ For checking my own identifications I send every new or tricky species into iRecord usually via the Android app. Web address of main site below...

 I intend to make this beginners guide as straightforward as possible. To that end I will do some short posts covering resources, equipment and courses for home and field use. Let's start with the books I use. The original is definitely British Hoverflies by Alan Stubbs and Steven Falk. It's a weighty tomb but stuffed full of keys, drawings and information. Until recently it was the go-to publication but I have only just got round to buying a copy to give me an alternative source if I get stuck. The two I use most are, firstly the excellent Wildguide to Hoverflies of Britain and Ireland by Stuart Ball and Roger Morris. This builds on the keys used in the Stubbs one and the third addition uses photos and diagrams to identify many of the British species. I say many because not all can be done from photos as we will see later in this series. My other go-to is now the Hoverflies of Britain and North West Europe by Sander Bot and Frank Van de Meutter.           ...

For the past two years I have been dipping my toes into a new group of insects; the hoverflies. Having begun to get a basic idea of how to find, identify and record them I have set myself a challenge for this year. During 2026 I will attempt to see, and importantly, correctly identify, 100 different species in Great Britain. I thought that a starter guide may be helpful for others wanting to learn about this colourful and vital group so will aim to blog regularly with hints, tips and reports from my efforts. I am starting in the depths of winter so this should give me time to set the scene, as it were, and carry on with preparations and research. So far this year we have had cold weather and I have not as yet seen a live adult hoverfly but there is plenty of preparation to be done. Over the next few weeks I will endeavour to cover the equipment, books and other resources that I have acquired over the last two years which have proved valuable. First though a couple of pictures from last...

 Our first two big bonuses were that we managed to agree an extension on the villa hire and that a company based at the dock had a car for hire for the whole period. The villa was a pig to find as the instructions got lost in the ether until we actually arrived. Once we did find it it was a great base for us. The sea views were a bit too distant for birds though and despite a lot of staring out I did not see a cetacean all stay. Our villa was in the N E corner between Ribiera Grande and Sinagoga. It was a great base with a bedroom each and 5 bathrooms along with a large kitchen and lounge. The pool was frankly only used by Jim and the two Jacuzzis were wasted on us.  For future reference we found the villa on VRBO hosted by Lolo Fildes and described as a luxury villa. I would not hesitate to recommend it. Birds. First and foremost our plan was to follow up on Peter Stronach's sightings of Black-capped Petrels. T do this the team scoped out likely sites for seawatches while I n...

 A year ago an intrepid Scottish birder called Peter Stronach discovered a likely breeding colony of Black-capped Petrels on the island of Santa Antao in the Cape Verde islands. Having had an interest in seabirds since university, this seemed a great opportunity to follow up his observations. Accordingly 4 of us set off from Bristol airport on Monday Jan 29th 2024 to try and follow in his footsteps. Santa Antao is not straightforward to reach so we first flew to Lisbon and overnighted in a Holiday Inn Express.  The next mornig we caught a TAP flight to Sao Vicente where we planned to explore and seawatch for a few days while working out if we could get ferries to other islands and watch from them. While this sort of planning seems simple in the world of the internet, it doesn't work like that in the cape verdes. Our first contact, however was superb meeting us at the airport and handing over our hire car at his office. No paperwork seemed to be involved and we simply set off f...