Typical

I photographed several of the usual suspects today - Black-headed Gulls in Stratford this morning, and Honey Bees and Shieldbugs (various) in the garden this afternoon - but as you know, two of the things I find hardest to resist are a weevil, and an insect I've never seen before... so a weevil I'd never seen before proved simply irresistible. It was tricky to photograph though, because it was really very small - probably only about 3.5 mm long - and by the time I spotted it on the pendulous sedge by the wildlife pond it was late enough for the sun to have dropped behind the trees at the end of the garden, so I was really fighting the exposure triangle. In the end I stopped trying to achieve the unachievable, tossed up between extra support and extra light, and stomped back to the kitchen to fetch a monopod, which added just enough extra stability to secure me a dozen reasonable frames.

After this came the issue of identification. Starting with the simplest possible method, I ran all the best frames through the Obsidentify app - but though this will usually at least point me in a reasonable direction, it can sometimes fail spectacularly, and this was one of those occasions.

Ichneumonid, it suggested. Really?? Does this honestly look like a wasp?

Try again.

Common Winter Damsel. Seriously?? Honestly - just sort yourself out.

Again.

Crabronid wasp (unknown). Good grief...

Again.

Common Scorpionfly. Aaaarrrggghhh!

Honey Bee? WTAF????

Banded Demoiselle. ENOUGH!!! Just stop!

There was nothing for it: I was going to have to tackle Mark Gurney's Weevil Guides. But where to start? After taking a few vague stabs at different weevil families and getting nowhere, I suddenly had the bright idea of asking in the Beetles of Britain and Ireland group on Facebook, from which I received the advice to look at Baris, Limnobaris and Aulacobaris species. (Honestly: what did anyone do before the internet?) 

So, I've ploughed through what Mr Gurney terms "Typical Weevils", and I think my little guy is probably one of the Aulacobaris species. Beyond this though, I really can't go - as my correspondent on Facebook pointed out, to sort out which of the four blue species this was, I'd really need to have kept the specimen and keyed it out. Or better yet, given it to someone who knows what they're doing for keying out. And while I recognise the value of this level of investigation, I'm not an entomologist, and I don't think that satisfying my curiosity is a good enough reason for killing an insect. So unless the beetle verifier on iRecord has anything to add, I'll just list this as Aulacobaris sp., and move on. I will be keeping an eye out for more specimens though, because from the little information I've been able to find about them all the Aulacobaris are wetland weevils with a taste for swampy plants, so the sedge in and around the little pond in my very marshy wildlife garden seems like habitat that might work for them.

R: C6, D3.