The Results are In

Just a very brief post, firstly to say thank you to everybody who has taken the time to read this blog throughout the year. I definitely should have blogged more often, I should also have taken more time to make the posts a bit more interesting and colourful, but you stuck with it and for that I am grateful. 

Now, about that Challenge between The Ghost and myself....

I've had my nose in the Backlog Box for most of the past twelve evenings or so, desperately hoping to maintain my lead over The Ghost. A few days ago he told me he had overtaken my fly tally and was now working at his beetles. I continued my backlog box trawl, adding yet more species to my own diptera tally. Yesterday, the last day of the year, I didn't bother. I'd simply had enough, time to call it quits. Surely the handful of extra species I might be able to glean from it wouldn't make any odds anyway.  

My 2020 beetle tally is 168 species. My diptera tally is 247 species, combined that totals 415 species. The Ghost sent me his final update shortly after midnight last night. 255 diptera and 166 beetles, which is 422 species. Damnit, why oh why didn't I do that one final backlog trawl? So yeah, the tortoise has indeed beaten the hare, just as he promised he would. The bloody-minded fiend, haha! And yes, as promised I will be presenting him with a six pack of V, his medicine as he calls it, as reward for winning our challenge. Bless him, he really must have put some serious effort into those beetles, he was absolutely miles behind me on those. As I say, sheer bloody-mindedness. 

So that's it folks, 2020 is done and this blog is now officially closed. As requested, I shall leave it up online, at least until my Home Blog becomes too full of tabs to these annual blogs and I have a cull. 

Oh, except to say that The Ghost has challenged me for 2021 too. And ridiculously I have accepted. Once a fool, always a fool... I'm still chasing diptera in 2021, but for the first time ever I'm also concentrating on spiders. I have no idea how many species I will find in the year. Is a hundred species a realistic target? I actually have no clue, this will be one big learning curve for me. The Ghost is rather keen on his bugs, and so our new challenge is another head to head with the tallies - spiders for me and homopteran hoppers for him. There are many more spider species in Britain than there are hoppers, but the bulk of them occur in the warmer south of Britain and I'm pretty clueless on the ones that do occur up here. It could be a fair challenge, or I could be setting myself up for another defeat. In truth I don't think either one of us knows how the forthcoming year is going to pan out. 

If you've enjoyed this blog and would maybe like to keep tabs on my 2021 Spiders and Flies Challenge, please visit www.spiderflies.blogspot.com and I look forward to your company over there too. If you've linked this site to your own blog, could you maybe replace it with the new one, should you feel so inclined. 

Cheers for now folks!  

The Eleventh Hour

Well this blog has certainly fallen by the wayside of late! It's not as though I haven't been catching and identifying beetles and flies since my last update three months ago, it's just that I really haven't been very good at blogging about it. Thankfully, in a way, with a mere three days of the year remaining you won't have to worry about my lack of input into this blog for very much longer. I'm still somewhat undecided regards whether or not to take this blog offline, or to leave it up. It will no longer be updated in either case, seeing as this was always going to be a blog purely for the duration of 2020. I suspect that I'll leave it online for a month or so and then pull it. Should you want to save any part of it, now is probably a good time!

So what was the original purpose of this blog?

Traditionally I set myself annual challenges which focus on a couple of discrete areas in natural history. For 2020 I decided to continue my dalliance with the insect orders Coleoptera and Diptera. There aren't any groups that I actively dislike, but clearly I find some more attractive than others; beetles and flies both fall into this latter category. My aim for 2020 was to discover if my interest in beetles and flies would blossom or wane, would I become more enthused by one over the other, would I lose enthusiasm for both, how would I feel about them after a year spent in their company? The purpose of this blog was to chart and record my journeys in, and discoveries of, all things coleopteran and dipteran.  

Did I stick to this purpose?

Pretty much. Apart from the obvious lack of blogging in the final quarter of the year, I did indeed make headway with both beetles and flies. Halfway through the year I had a sneaking suspicion of how the remainder of the year would pan out - though I wouldn't have placed money on it ending that way at the beginning of the year.

First quarter of the year round-up

As is always the case, I start the year massively enthused and keen for action. This year was no exception and halfway through the first week I decided that I ought to be keeping tabs on how many different dipteran and coleopteran families I was encountering. Gotta love a spreadsheet! Somehow this ended up being a joint effort between myself and three other fellow nutters who read this blog. It soon developed into a mildly competitive game of chase as we all added our respective fly families onto the spreadsheet. Unfortunately for three of us, there was a decent dipterist in our ranks and he stormed ahead of the rest of us in short order. Quite simply, he's not allowed to play next time. 

Then my old mate The Ghost came up with a cunning plan, why not have our own little challenge running alongside my own? He's not too shabby with his flies but is not very up on his beetles. I'm pretty shabby at my beetles but even worse with flies. The challenge was simple - whoever had the highest combined total of identified beetles and flies at the end of the year was the winner. I'm a complete sucker for a challenge and it took me all of about three nanoseconds to agree. Game on!

Towards the end of February I managed to book in some holiday time and headed south to friends in Hampshire and Bedfordshire. One friend happened to be quite into flies, the other is massively into beetles...definitely nothing in The Rules to say this wasn't allowed. I saw lots of great stuff whilst in Hampshire, including a simply amazing session sieving reedbed litter at Lymington with a huge haul of beetles found. This was followed by several jaunts into the New Forest leaflitter sieving. Up until this point I had been identifying my beetle and fly specimens for myself. Then I stayed with Mark Telfer for a few days and things changed. We spent time sieving soil in Whipsnade Zoo's Butterfly House (!), sieving giant piles of woodchip in Milton Keynes and sieving debris from rotten trees in Buckinghamshire. At one point I even found myself halfway up a tree ragging out a storm-exposed honeybee nest in case there were beetles in the bottom of it. You could say that my 2020 beetle list had taken off with a bit of a bang! Those few days in early March were by far and away the absolute highlight of my entire beetling year. I had a fantastic time, the company was terrific and I learned absolutely loads. I did also manage to find a few flies whilst down south, though they lagged behind the beetle tally by a fair margin. It was simply too early in the year for them really. A visit to Dinton Pastures Country Park, my first time there in maybe twenty years, provided me with the opportunity to wave a few pinned fungus gnats beneath the nose of legendary dipterist Peter Chandler. This added a further two species to the tally, with one of those being a lifer. 

At the end of March 2020 my fly tally stood at 31 species (17 lifers, with 15 of them self-identified) whereas my beetle tally stood at a whopping 98 species (53 lifers, 24 of which were identified by Mark Telfer). 

At this point I had accrued a massive lead over The Ghost in our private challenge. I think he was on about 10 beetles and had yet to spot a fly at the time, haha!

Second quarter of the year round-up

I didn't leave Skye for this period, not even for a daytrip. I didn't meet with any other naturalists either. Coronavirus had put the country into lockdown, anything but essential, local travel was a no-no. Everyone here at the hotel was furloughed. Oh, apart from me, I still worked my full hours. Initially I was happy with this, it meant that my job was relatively safe, but it soon rankled watching the other live-in staff throwing beer-fuelled barbeque after beer-fuelled barbeque and waving at me as I mowed the lawns/painted the walls/wished they would all drop dead. For the duration of April and May my world decreased to the size of the monad I live inside, with occasional excursions into a neighbouring monad if I was feeling particularly adventurous. But the weather was great and fun was still to be had. I largely restricted my antics with sweep net and beating tray to the upper, relatively inaccessible section of Uig Wood, well out of sight from the locals. Throughout the entire summer I only saw one family hike through those woods on one single occasion, otherwise I used it as my own private playground. In June I began venturing a little further afield on Skye as the Scottish lockdown restrictions slowly began to ease.

The flies on Skye suddenly woke up with the onset of spring warmth and my meagre tally of 31 species shot up to a more healthy 127 species by the end of June (46 lifers during this period, all self-identified). Conversely, my beetle tally, though still increasing, had started slowing down. It increased by just 41, up from 98 to 139 species (with a mere 12 lifers added, all self-identified). I did manage to find the marram specialist Otiorhynchus atroapterus at Glenbrittle Beach, which I believe is a beetle new to Skye. I suspect that, in part, this slowing of new beetle species was due to my becoming ever more fixated on catching flies and a lack of samping techniques undertaken. I'm not sure I used my sieve at all in this period, certainly I failed to set any pitfall or bait traps, as had been my plan. I also came to realise that it's a lot quicker and far easier to mount and label flies than it is to card beetles. In fact, I came to see carding beetles as a necessary evil and not something I took particular pains to perfect. This too, I feel, played a part in my favouring flies over beetles. Sheer laziness, end of the day. 

Third quarter of the year round-up

Scottish lockdown ended in time for high summer and I was free to meet up with other naturalists once more. Unfortunately, I only know a few decent naturalists here on Skye. One was self-isolating on an island, another had seemingly disappeared into the ether and the other seemed to be mostly doing his own thing. Despite this, we did manage to meet up on three separate occasions, each one putting me in territory I didn't know, allowing me to find a few extra flies and beetles that would otherwise have remained off my radar. I had already placed all of the Skye Nature Group's 2020 field trips on hold at the beginning of lockdown, which is where they stayed throughout the remainder of the year, so these few outings in the company of other naturalists was a blessing to me.

The easing of lockdown also allowed Ali from Fife to head across to Skye and spend a few days easing me into the world of muscids, amongst various other hairy flies. Evenings spent shoulder to shoulder at the microscopes, assorted keys strewn across the table top, cans of beer at our feet made for a very useful if slightly messy contribution to my knowledge of keying diptera. It's not so daunting when you've a decent dipterist sat at your side talking you through the options, and I'm very grateful for the helpful mental nudges he provided whenever I struggled. Plus he named a lot of flies in the field, sharing hints and tips for the identification of many - always very useful!

Crunch time. How did I fare with the beetles? Well, (and I'm so sorry, Mark!) in this three month period I managed to amass a pathetic eleven additions to my 2020 beetle tally, representing a rise from 139 to 150 species (6 being lifers, all self-identified). And the flies? Well they jumped by 68 species, meaning I was on 195 species for the year so far (39 lifers with 29 of those being self-identified in this period). My diptera tally overtook my coleoptera tally on 16th July and it simply never looked back from that point onwards. 

The Ghost was still a considerable way behind both my beetle and fly totals. I found it hard to believe that I was beating, nay thrashing, his fly tally, but he was insistent I led by a fair margin. Tortoise and hare, he told me. W'eva, loser! 

Fourth quarter of the year round-up

In October I spent an amazing eight days in the company of TinyRecorder and The Ghost traipsing our way across every inhabited island on The Scillies, finding all manner of weird and wonderful animals and plants in the process. I came away with sixty new species on my PSL, sixty in a week!!! Lots of our time was dedicated to seeking out weird alien plants and creatures in rockpools, but clearly we also found a lot of flies and beetles whilst there. I was slightly miffed to discover that we'd effectively walked past a Locust Fly along one ivy-strewn lane, seen and photographed by a chap who hadn't realised what it was until a few days later. I had a look, but either it had moved on by then or I simply missed it. Darn. In mid-December I learned that The Ghost had begun spending time at his microscope, quietly going through the backlog of flies from earlier this year. Tortoise and hare! What a sneaky wee beggar! In retaliation, I too hit the backlog box and made good progress clearing whole rows of neatly pinned flies. In the space of a single week's worth of evenings at the microscope I added over thirty species to my PSL. Days spent in the field came few and far between, as I prioritised catching up on various tasks elsewhere. Never the less, I continued to slowly add both fly and beetle species to the tally. A surprise find was an Adistemia watsoni slowly trying to break free from a blunder trap I'd placed in the kitchen, my second one for the site and, I think, one of only two or three beetle species that I have up on Mark Telfer!

The year isn't over yet and I'm going to hit the backlog box again before 2020 ends, but at the moment my beetle tally stands at 168 species (18 additions in the period with 6 lifers, 5 being self-identified) and my fly tally stands at 234 species (39 additions, mostly from the backlog box and all self-identified).

BUT...

Yesterday I received shocking news. Very shocking news. The Ghost has been exceptionally naughty and his diptera tally has finally overtaken my own. About bloody time, I say! I never envisioned holding the lead much beyond about April or May, never mind for 363 out of 366 days (leap year innit).  

So I plan to get stuck in with the pinned stuff and see if I can claw back that lead. Forget the American presidential elections, if I lose this bastard challenge I WILL be demanding a recount and taking the sneaky so and so to court on charges of fraud. I'm fighting this all the way, you won't see me on no damn golf course! Well, not unless there are new flies or beetles on it. 

Stay tuned for the final post of 2020 Vision, which will be published at year's end. 

Place your bets now folks. And sorry for the lack of piccies. Umm...have this, the Backlog Box. It was three boxes at one point, so I'm doing alright!

EDIT: I have just been informed by the main man himself that I haven't led on the flies since the very beginning at all. It seems he overtook me to reach 100 species first, it was only after that I began whupping his ass. My selective memory does play tricks on me, it seems.

He also says not to waste my time trying to catch him up. I thought he'd been a bit quiet of late. Oh dear, looks as though the tortoise has beaten the hare on the diptera front, at least. 

Maybe...

Ain't Nothing 'Lesser' about this Dungfly!

Here on Skye, the Sphaeroceridae are a commonly encountered bunch of flies. By and large they are tricky blighters to identify, being mostly small flies clothed in various shades of black. Exotic they ain't. Or so I thought.  Here's the relevant section of Stuart Ball's Diptera Family Descriptions

The difficulty rating for fly families tops out at 4, these are rated 3-4. I figured Sphaeroceridae were essentially beyond mine and my microscope's abilities. I mean, just imagine checking the orientation of orbital bristles or doing a gen det on a fly that rocks in at 0.7mm! But yesterday I swiped what was, according to my notebook entry, an "ugly black fly walking around on leaf". I remember it well (it was only yesterday after all...) a flattish, hairy thing that put me in mind of a Kelp Fly (Coelopidae). Except I was in the middle of deciduous woodland nearly half a mile from the sea. It was walking around and around a Tutsan leaf, saw me and scurried to the underside, then back up again. I netted it directly from the leaf before it could fly away, though I suspect it would probably have simply fallen to the ground rather than fly off. I pinned it last night and only checked it this afternoon after another failed Yellow-browed Warbler hunt. 

Beneath the microscope I quickly guessed it was Sphaeroceridae, the obviously enlarged first segment to the hind tarsus being the giveaway feature. I ran it through Oosterbroek anyway and it did indeed drop it out at Sphaeroceridae. Cool, I actually recognised it correctly. Here's a pic of the beast on a pin

Two things stand out with this fly. Firstly the enlarged first segment of the hind tarsus. Secondly, there's a bloomin' great hook on the underside of the hind femur. Plus, as far as Lesser-dungflies go, it's a real giant. I measured it at 5.5mm long, that's the absolute maximum size for any member of this family. I fancied my chances with this bad boy, so reached across for my copy of the RES Handbook.

I keyed it through and soon went wrong. Like definitely wrong. Hmmm. I couldn't see where I'd erred until about the second or third subsequent attempt. I was entirely happy that I'd keyed it correctly in the subfamilies key (to Copromyzinae) but from there I kept getting sent to Borborillus, which it wasn't. Suddenly I realised I'd gone wrong at the very first couplet due to thinking I knew what I was looking at rather than checking properly. Dingbat, will I ever learn?

It's a rubbish image, but it proved surprisingly difficult to show you what I wanted (so difficult that I didn't 'see' it properly for myself the first couple of times I keyed this feature!) Look at the bristles behind the eye, plus on the back of the head itself. The key asks if these are in one row or two. At a quick glance I repeatedly saw one row just behind the eye. But actually, you need to count the ones behind this row too. And that's where I kept going wrong. Once I'd overcome that minor fiasco, it was actually very easy. 

There are lots of good ID clinchers in this one image

Wing venation also helps clinch the ID

A (very) shortened version of the "Key to genera and species of Copromyzinae" now follows - 

1) Postocular setae in a single row or at least two usually irregular rows? Well now we know... >>11

11) One or two setae on postpronotal lobe? Scroll back up to the second fly image and count the big bristles on the "shoulder pad". Just one, not two. So >>12

12) Wings greatly reduced or full. Obviously they're full  >>13

13) Hind tibia with or without anteroventral bristle at about the middle?

Nope, no anteroventral bristle at or about the middle of the hind tibia >>14

There are several parts to Couplet 14 so I'll tackle them individually. 

14a) Anepisternum part shining or mostly shining? Scroll up three images to the one where I say there are lots of good features. The anepisternum is the flat 'body panel' that has the pin sticking through its extreme bottom right corner. You can see that the front, bottom half of this 'panel' is black and shiny, but the top and rear edge are matt. So I'd go with part shining as opposed to mostly shining. 

14b) katepisternum with 2 or 3 close-set, very long setae, or not? Scroll up to the same image again (sorry!) and just in front of the pin you can see a couple of pale wispy things that extend to just beneath the pin. These are actually three long black wispy hairs, they've just happened to catch the light which makes them look very pale. So yes, there are 2 or 3 long setae present. 

14c) Male with or without a large tubercle at base of hind femur? You can clearly see the 'hook' (or large tubercle as the text states) sticking out from the base of the femur. 

At this point we either drop out at a species, or continue on through more baffling terminology. Happily, this is where we drop out to species. 

"Anepisternum part shining, katepisternum with two or three close-set, very long, setae. Male with large tubercle at the base of the hind femora. Very large species (length 4.0-5.5mm).... Crumomyia nitida (Meigen)."

Just to smash home that I have the ID correct, the first line of the description reads, "In woods, running over leaves....." Ha, that's precisely what I wrote in my notebook. Only I added "ugly black fly", but I guess the author of this particular handbook would probably disagree with that sentiment. 

This is the first sphaerocerid I've tried to key through and, minor issues with postocular setae aside, it wasn't at all tricky. To be fair, I suspect this is one of the easier species to identify. I did a bit of online researching and found this rather brilliant page which clearly shows all the features that my images claim to show. A quick peek at the NBN Atlas shows that it occurs up here too, always a relief when that happens. There's a September 2015 record from Skye itself, hence mine will be the second Skye record according to the NBN. Lots of records in the Inverness area, that'll be Murdo from HBRG. Also a handful of Outer Hebs records, which is always good to see. 

New for Skye Beetle

I went out looking for Yellow-browed Warblers today (there have been at least five found on Skye the past few days, quite an unprecedented influx!) and instead found a weird plant that has the BSBI Recorder puzzled and a beetle that is new to Skye and of a family entirely new to myself. I failed on the YBW front, but I'm off work tomorrow too. 

I was wandering the woods near Cuillin Hills Hotel down in Portree, pishing away like a loon, when I spotted a dead birch trunk with maybe twenty Birch Polypore fungi ranked down its length. If ever there's a manky, half-rotten polypore within reach I tend to pull it free of the trunk and rip it apart in search of fungus beetles. Usually all I find are tiny midge larvae and the odd aleoch, one of which I found and carded today. Happily, I also found a distinctive looking beetle which rocked in at a whacking 5mm in length. Here it is, slightly dazed I imagine after being knocked to the ground from about eight feet up

I didn't have a clue what this was when I saw it. Which meant it was probably a tenebrionid. Back indoors I checked the options - ok, so it's not a tenebrionid. Happily it keyed through very easily to Tetratomidae, a whole new family for me and colloquially known as the polypore beetles! Haha, how bloody perfect is that?  I jumped online and discovered that there are only a handful of British species so it was easy to name this as Tetratoma fungorum. I still went ahead and ran through all the relevant identification features, obviously. Happily everything fits, though mine seems to be about a third of a millimetre too long (I blame my tape measure, it's the six metre one I use for work which I suspect may be less accurate than a graticule). Next I jumped on the NBN Atlas in order to check its distribution. Oh...

I'm glad there's a dot way up in the north of Scotland, gives me hope that I haven't completely mangled my identification! Next I turned to my trusty copy of Richard Moore's Beetles of Raasay which confirmed that Tetratoma is unknown on Skye. But there is a record from Rum, which is somewhat less than a million miles from Skye. The only other member of Tetratomidae to occur up here is Hallomenus binotatus, thanks to two specimens found on Rasaay in 2005 and a Rum record (I don't know the date for that). There are no other records at all of any tetratomid beetle for the Inner Hebrides and none whatsoever for the Outer Hebrides, as far as I can see. 

As you may have noticed, I had a slight mishap extracting the left antenna from beneath its head....

.

I'm really quite keen to pull apart more Birch Polypores now! They aren't anywhere near as commonplace up here as they are down south, but they aren't so scarce that I'd feel terribly guilty destroying a few fruit bodies. Not if it helps add more Tetratoma dots to the maps. I don't need to collect any more specimens, they're distinctive enough that even I should be able to recognise one again, I'll just take a piccie instead. 

Regards the 2020 Challenge that is ongoing between The Ghost and myself, I'm absolutely whupping his arse in both the beetle and the fly totals. However, I simply cannot afford to become complacent, he has many specimens in his storebox and, between bouts of haunting folks, has been slotting in some serious microscopy time. He is slowly closing the gap between our totals. 

But if he beats my beetle tally I'll eat my best woolly hat. 

House Fly

Anybody remember those crows in funny hats from the film Dumbo? They were chatting about whether any of them had ever seen an elephant fly just before bursting into song. No? Oh ok, just me then. Anyway, it begin with

Well I seen a horse fly

And I seen a dragon fly

Yeah I seen a house fly!

Well tonight, dear reader, I can safely say that I too have now seen a house fly. THE House-fly, in fact. Musca domestica is a scarce beast in the Highland Region. The Highland Biological Recording Group (HBRG) have a couple of pages about it here and here. The webmaster of HBRG is a keen dipterist named Murdo. He once told me that he was the only resident dipterist in the entire Highland Region (he's based in the east near Inverness) and so, after I first rocked up on Skye, he was quite keen to hear about what I was finding out here in the far west. 

I have to admit, I didn't know I had the House-fly until the very last moment as I ran it through the keys

"...so it's in Muscinae, ok. Key to genera runs fine to Musca. *turn to page 9*, ah that's the next page, cool. Musca huh, how many of those can there be? Couplet 1 - yes it has bare eyes, couplet 2 propleural depression with small black hairs or bare? Hmmm...the heck is one of those then? Ah, there's a picture. Oh, it's the bit in front of the front spiracle. Ok so... *squints*, yep I see small black hairs. Musca domestica. Cool, that was simple. HANG ON!!!"   

It's not a particularly spectacular fly, though it has several features which, in combination, make it quite easy to identify. The angle of a wing vein, the four black lines on the top of the thorax, the bare eyes, the yellow areas on the abdomen. And the coup de grâce - a bunch of small blackish hairs on the aforementioned propleural depression. Here they are, arrowed in all of their glory

If it wasn't for those wee hairs, plus a coupla other fine details, it would be Musca autumnalis. I've yet to knowingly see that species, and I'm unlikely to unless I head southwards a few hundred miles. One for another time, maybe.

I figured Murdo would like to know about it, so sent him a load of images. He came back with this

In certain circles that would deserve a dram, Seth! I don’t think any more images are needed. It is a really scarce fly, though we have had 6 records this year from Uig to Ft William to the Black Isle.

Anyway, to inject a splash of colour into a rather grey post, here are those crazy crows singing to an elephant that can fly

Seeing as there are a load of black crows in that vid, have some proper head bobbin' music. I fully expect lots of screaming into an imaginary mic too.

So Rare it was Considered Extinct

I have a bit of a mammoth backlog of posts to compile, but this one stands out as what I'd consider a decent stroke of luck and well worth blogging about. 

I managed to sneak away for a few days last week and, amongst other places, dropped in to Abernethy in Speyside. The amount of campervans and cars slung into every roadside layby, car park and flat bit of verge was horrifying to see. The two large dumpster-style bins with piles of plastic bags heaped up inside and all around them was also pretty yucky to witness. Not as yucky as the "mountains of human excrement" supposedly everywhere you step in the Glenmore beach area, but I didn't slow down as I hurried on by that particular scene. I was off to explore Abernethy!

My cunning plan was thwarted, the tracks through the forest were 'closed to public access'. Well, that was a bit crap. Undeterred I wandered up a private road (the Scottish rights to roam laws are particularly generous) which terminated at a cottage to my right, woodland to my left and a shallow river ahead of me. I spied a bit of boardwalk and was suddenly surrounded by a flock of crossbills which I'm convinced are Parrot Crossbills. At least 40 of them! Just listen to this relentless bi-chuu begging call, have you ever heard anything like that from a Common Crossbill? And just listen to the tone of the calls from the flock, these are Parrots all the way for me! I know it's a shoddy bit of video, but look at the big heads and thick beaks on these birds. Sadly I'd left my binoculars in the car else I'd have digi-binned some images too.

Rather a large crop from the vid above. Parrot Crossbill. Utter beast!

But this is a beetle and fly blog, I hear you cry. Yeah, I'm getting there, I'm just setting the scene is all...

A while later I began ambling back down the road towards my parked car, where I caught a huge Tabanus sudeticus bouncing off the bonnet and windscreen. I briefly worried that I'd need to call Autoglass to replace the screen, but luckily it grew tired of vandalising my car and slowly veered off across the tree tops and was gone. I spied an open patch of heathy bog through the trees and went off in search of White-faced Darter (no luck, I may in fact be destined to never see one). I pushed through a strip of Bracken and spied the rather smart tachinid Dexiosoma caninum sat on a tall frond. One swipe of the net and it was secured, along with my first ever Leptogaster guttiventris which is an incredibly thin species of robberfly and a fantastic bycatch - I hadn't even seen it when I swung the net!

Fast forward six days to this morning where I've been keying through yet more flies. I reached the Dexiosoma and, although I was pretty happy with the ID, I sat down and ran it through the keys. 

The fly is 9mm long and its wings are 7mm long each

I used Belshaw to ID this fly. An abridged version of the key to genera follows

1) Very large black fly with a yellow head. No >> 2

2) Body bright metallic colour, usually green or blue/violet etc. No >>4

4) Arista with hairs longer than its maximum width. Yes >>5

The long hairs of the arista are easily visible in this image

5) Proboscis extremely elongated. No >> 6

6) Face with a ridge between the antennae. Yes >>7

Very definitely has a sharp ridge between the antennae

7) Excavation on tergite 1+2 extending to rear margin or only two thirds towards the rear margin?

The 'excavation' is a small hollow on the fly's back. I have no idea why it's there or what purpose it performs, but it is used as a feature in the key. Here's a pic from the key showing the excavation reaching the rear edge of the tergite (16) and only reaching two thirds of the way (17)

And this is a pic of my fly. The excavation is the big pitchy-black coloured area

So that extends to the rear edge of the tergite. >> DEXIA

So not Dexiosoma at all, but the very similar Dexia. There are only two species of Dexia on the British list, Dexia vacua and Dexia rustica. The key to species couldn't have been much easier to navigate.

Abdomen 4 with a black stripe along its posterior margin. 6-9mm in length. Thorax with 2 katepisternal bristles >> vacua

Abdomen 4 without such markings. 7-12mm in length. Thorax with 3 katepisternal bristles >> rustica

Let's have a look then....

Big, thick black band at posterior edge of abdomen 4 - check! 

The katepisternal bristles are a bit tricky to decipher from a 2D image, though they're easy enough to see whilst slowly turning the fly back and forth beneath a microscope. The katepisternum itself is the large body 'panel' situated above the middle and hind legs, hence the katepisternal bristles are the  bristles to be found on this area of the body. Weird terminology, I know. And they keep changing it too! So much jargon to learn.

Anyway, I've added three red dots where the katepisternal bristles sit. You'll notice that one dot has no big thick bristle.

All of which means this fly is Dexia vacua. Cool, an unexpected lifer. I better have a quick Google and find out a bit about it, y'know just in case it's a goodun....

One of the first sites I looked at was an ID article written by Chris Raper, an expert dipterist with a penchant for tachinids. He's written papers and keys on tachinids, not just British species but on a worldwide basis. He runs the Tachinid Recording Scheme and is one of Britain's most respected authorities on these bristly beasties. "It's a bristle thing" is his tagline, in fact. These are the opening lines from his ID article regards telling Dexiosoma and Dexia apart:

I always find that one of the hardest identifications to make from photos is the split between Dexiosoma caninum and the much rarer Dexia vacua. Dexia vacua is so rare that many experts thought that it was extinct in Western Europe...

Say what?!?!?!?

I looked at my fly, dead on a pin. Killed with mine own hands. Oh shite.

Still dead. And getting rarer...

Belshaw gives the flight period as late July and August. He also suggests it's relatively widely spread across mainland Britain. Mind you, it was written the best part of thirty years ago and things don't stay static out there as years roll by. In fact, further Googling took me to various sites where I learned that several European countries have recently declared Dexia vacua as no longer occuring in that country. Indeed, it now seems that Britain is the stronghold of the species in western Europe and it's pretty flippin' rare here too.  

With a small degree of trepidation I popped a few pics up on the UK Diptera Facebook page and tagged Chris Raper in the post. Within minutes he responded - 

Wow, very nice indeed - a very rare fly. They're almost extinct in Western Europe

Confirmation from The Master, phew I hadn't ballsed it up and I hadn't gotten in trouble either (ha!) For future reference, if I net a Dexiosoma all I need to do is check for a ridge between the plumose arista and a black band at the rear edge of the 4th abdominal tergite. If it has those it's another Dexia, and no need to kill it, I'll just take lots of really good pics instead!

Into the Jaws of Death

Not quite as terrifyingly horrific as disembarking from a landing craft and straight into heavy enemy gunfire, as happened early one June morning in 1944 (I'm sure you've seen the Omaha Beach landing scenes from Saving Private Ryan) but nonetheless, after viewing this down the barrel of my microscope, I felt a sudden pang of sympathy for the hapless victims of the beetle I found scampering across the grass clipping pile this morning. Imagine you are a centimetre long, quietly squirming your way through the grass heap before sensing you were being watched. You freeze, trying to escape notice but already it's far too late as you are scooped up into the jaws of death...

Pity one mandible moved inwards a smidge before the glue dried

Beetles have very definitely taken a back seat of late. In fact, I was pondering that sad fact just this morning, wondering what it would take to reignite my interest in them. And then boom - this huge bugger ran out in front of me, right on cue. 

Safely in a glass pot - barely! 

I was in the process of dumping my second or third wheelie bin of grass clippings onto a rather sizeable grass heap when I spotted motion by my foot. Ooh, a great big brown staphy. I had no pots or tubes on me - instant panic! I reached down and grabbed it in my fist before heading indoors to find a tube. There's a fair chance that had I have noticed quite how large its jaws were I may have acted differently! Anyway, I threw it into a large glass tube and was shocked to watch it scamper up the vertical sides with ease. Twice I almost decapitated it whilst trying to slam the lid into place, but finally it was contained within and I continued emptying and refilling the wheelie bin with yet more grass clippings. Those lawns were getting a tad out of control but it's great to know that the resulting grass piles are proving so attractive to flies and their predators.

As soon as I'd finished for the day, I looked to see exactly what it was that I'd captured.

This is Ontholestes tessellatus, a large staphylinid beetle that can be found in dung heaps, carrion and  also - it would seem - in and around decomposing grass clipping piles. Basically, anywhere that has a concentration of fly and beetle larva upon which it preys. I've not seen this beetle before. There are just two British species in the genus, the other being Ontholestes murinus which I've seen before, though not on Skye. Ontholestes tessellatus is my 529th British beetle. One day I shall attempt to work out how many of those 529 were self-found and identified. I fear far too many have been shown to me without my understanding quite why they were what I was told at the time. 

It really is a spectacular beast! The NBN Atlas suggests it is entirely new to Skye (indeed new to the whole of The Hebrides), but Richard Moore lists two records from adjacent Raasay, though none for Skye itself.

This is a fast-moving killing machine, pouncing on its victims from above. There's only one song that fits. Enjoy! 

This is the famous Taxis to Hell – and Back – Into the Jaws of Death photograph, taken on June 6th 1944 by Robert F. Sargent, a chief photographer's mate in the United States Coast Guard. It shows the ill fated beach landing by American troops, landing on an unexpectedly heavily fortified beach held by a well-entrenched German army. After huge losses on both sides, the beach was finally taken.