First visit to Watercress this year

 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 tenax contrasting with yellow in E. pertenax, (Tapered Drone Fly).


One problem was the fact that the feet were often hidden in the stamens of the flowers, and a second was the angle of view, often obscuring the feet completely !



A further problem that I had not really anticipated was the amount of pollen clinging to the feet and legs.

This latter situation also made it hard to judge how swollen the rear femura were, another key feature for this group. Hopefully this photo below demonstrates the problem





 Occasionally an individual would pose in such a way, however, that this feature was really obvious



At least one possible Tapered and a small hoverfly that was, most likely, Spotted Thintail (Meliscaeva auricollis, got away from me and my feeble attempts with a long-handled net succeeded only in catching a Yellow Dung Fly !

Nevertheless the Watercress yearlist is underway and as always, with any form of interest in natural history, I learnt something from a different field, in this case botany.























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