Time for an update

Most of my spare time at the moment has been taken up with working through my backlog of specimens. This is the most productive way to spend this time of year but I cannot let the competition think he's having it all his own way so I've done a bit of fieldwork in the few moments of decent weather to get the lists up and running.

Flies have been thin on the ground even then but I've picked up a few cluster flies attracted to the white walls of a friends house and on the windows of a barn at Knepp. Most of them have been Pollenia species which need a bit of work in due course to get to species but I have added Calliphora vicina to the year list.

Calliphora vicina  (Wikimedia Commons)

Also attracted to the walls of my friends house was the Heleomyzid Heteromyza oculata.

Heteromyza oculata - BioLib.cz

As well as the fly and beetle species challenge, I appear to have been roped in to a fly families challenge. This involves seeing how many different families we can find and identify. The identification only needs to be to family level, not to species. So as well as the families where I have identified a species, I can also add Scathophagidae, Phoridae and Muscidae from Knepp. I have never looked closely at Phorids before but they are fairly easy to identify to family level, having characteristic reduced wing venation. I was particularly impressed with their faces though, especially their antennae with mini-footballs for the third antennal segment and sideways pointing arista. I suspect that getting them to species will be a struggle but I've ordered the key so watch this space.

Phorid head and wing

I also found a moth fly or drain fly (Psychodidae) in my bathroom and then, whilst lamping in Botley Wood the same evening, another species from this family. This family is normally a no-go area for normal people and they almost all need dissection and are horribly difficult but the specimen I found at Botley was unlike any I have seen before and I just wonder if it might be identifiable when I can access a decent museum collection in a week or so.

Moth fly from Botley Wood

Beetles will always be a secondary consideration for me in the challenge (mainly due to my inability to identify most of them) but I have picked up the very common Tenebrionid Nalassus laevioctostriatus which was crawling up a tree trunk at Knepp and the common ground beetle Dromius quadrimaculatus at Botley Wood.

Dromius quadrimaculatus

So I finish January on the 'grand' totals of 3 beetles and 4 flies to species and 6 fly families. I may be trailing in last place at the moment but that could change tomorrow when I'm spending some time in the field with a Coleopterist (if I can stop him looking at bloody spiders).