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First visit to Watercress this year

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  Watercress Farm is a Wilding site near Nailsea where I record insects in my role of species lead for Hoverflies. Thus a sunny afternoon demanded a visit to start of their yearlist and see what was about. My first discovery, after some helpful advice from a local entomological group, was that a hedge, that I had always considered to be Blackthorn that flowered early; was in fact Cherry Plum. A difference in petal size and the presence of rearward pointing sepals clinched it Cherry Plum Flowers Over a period of an hour or so I saw 4 or 5 different individual hoverflies visit the hedge. I tried to photograph every one, but with varying degrees of success. In the end everyone I saw well enough to identify confidently turned out to be a female Common Drone Fly (Eristalis tenax) Eristalis tenax female This photo shows the well separated eyes that most female hoverflies have I was particularly checking for the colour of the front and middle tarsi. These are black, or at least dark, in t...
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Sixty minutes of sun

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 This really is turning into a relentlessly wet winter. It has rained here at some point on almost every single day since the start of January. However between the showers today we had an hour of sun with a temperature of 10 degrees C. This was enough to draw in 4 hoverflies to the sugar sprayed bush. Two were Marmalade Hoverflies (Episyrphus balteatus) :- one that always sat with wings folded and one with wings open   Marmalade Hoverfly 1 Marmalade Hoverfly 2 Next up was my first Tapered Drone Fly of 2026. This was a male, the first hoverfly I have seen this year that has not been female. You can tell because the eyes touch along much of the centre-line Eristalis pertenax Then a small, darkish hoverfly with yellow body markings put in an appearence. This was clearly a Thintail (Meiliscaeva sp) but I wanted to get a photo that clinched which one of the two common ones it was. Having got a photo in situ I caught it and added a bit of CO2 to the pot for a minute or so. Setting u...
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Whiling away a wet February Tuesday

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 The rain here is going on and on and another day of damp dawned with the added complication that I needed to stay in for the afternoon to allow some minor work to be done in the house. My solution was to build a couple of bits of kit for the microscope and light box. I already had the small amount of wood needed so I popped down to my local hardware shop and spent £2.20 on some bolts brackets and washers.  An earlier visit had doubled that with wing nuts and 4 small magnets..... in case I give the impression of being a cheapskate ! Here's my purchases plus wood and screws from old stuff kept in the garage. The first item to complete was a new stage for the microscope that could go lower than my earlier attempt. The idea for using a magnet for holding the plastezote  rather than wood, came from a BENHS meeting in Reading and was suggested by Marc Taylor, if I have remembered correctly. Anyway, using the magnet gave me an alternative stage design as below     ...
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First Hoverflies of 2026

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 I finally managed to see some hoverfly adults today. The temperature was only 6C but the sun was out for a bit. The actual purpose of our trip to Dyffryn House near Cardiff was to look at Snowdrops but I had high hopes of more. In fact I only found a single flowering bush on the whole estate but this Sarcococca had three hoverflies of different species as well as a couple of bumble bees and a Yellow-Dungfly.                                                                    Episyrphus balteatus  The Marmalde Hoverfly The first was more or less expected, it being a relatively common overwintering species in southern England. The Marmalade Hoverfly.  The second species was again, not a surprise. This was the Common Drone Fly ( Eristalis tenax). I took loads of photos to be sure that I captured the critical...
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Searching for larvae

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In the brief dry window today I made my first attempt at finding hoverfly larvae this year. My last try failed but it seemed worth i, if only as a break from researching sites for later in the year. I chose to go to a local rewilding site where I am surveying regularly for hoverflies as part of a large volunteer effort. The site, Watercress farm near to Nailsea, is run by the Belmont Estate whose owners are seeking to prove that a nature based solution can generate money as an alternative to an intensive farming. It seems to me that as many alternative land uses as possible should be trialled to give Britain a healthier mix for the future generations. I set up shop in the Poplar Wood to search leaf litter for diapausing (resting phase) larvae.                                                                       ...
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Basic kit for identifying and saving specimens

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 I fully understand that many people would not like to catch, kill and preserve Hoverflies, preferring instead to photograph them. That is indeed fine and I have no issue with those views. For myself, though I feel strongly that it is important to know exactly what insects exist so that declines can be measured and action taken. Unfortunately it simply isn't yet possible to identify the majority of UK species in the field. I am fortunate to have the skills and opportunity  to carry out identification using a microscope. To me it is important that I do what bit I can. The UK Hoverflies Facebook group do a great job of recording about a third of the UK species but cannot, yet go beyond this. Roger Morris has written a paper discussing how trends in populations may be being influenced by photographic recording. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355203638_Is_photographic_recording_influencing_published_trends_in_the_relative_frequency_of_invertebrates?_tp=eyJjb250ZXh0Ijp7Im...
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Basic kit when in the field

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  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...
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