Red-letter hoverfly

If this was a bird I'd be calling it a lifer, I expect, but it's just a hoverfly so I won't go all triumphalist about it, even though it's a species I've never seen before. Well... maybe a bit triumphalist. I've marked it in red on my personal spreadsheet. Just while I'm bigging it up, I'm pretty pleased with the photo as well, especially given that conditions for macro work, and indeed for insects, and indeed for me, were far from ideal today. "It's COLD!" I said to R. "I feel like putting my thermals back on!" - and received a look that spoke eloquently of the amount of heat you can generate if you spend an hour digging weeds out of solid clay, which is what he'd just been doing, and I hadn't.

So, anyway. It was chilly, and dark, and there wasn't much out and about in the garden. I wasn't enjoying my garden mini-beast mini-safari, and in any case I was busy with desk-based stuff and didn't want to spend too much time hunting bugs. So I was very pleased when I spotted this gleaming apparition on the ivy on the walnut tree in the darkest part of the secret garden. And when he sat very calmly and allowed me to walk right up to him, I was even happier. And when I found out that he was a species I'd never recorded before, I was delighted.

He's Epistrophe nitidicollis, known colloquially on the Continent as the Dark-backed Smoothtail. There are six Epistrophe species in the UK, and apart from E. eligans, whose markings are unique, they're all banded in a way that makes them resemble the Syrphus and Parasyrphus species, as well as some of the Eupeodes. This group of banded hoverflies tends to make my heart sink, because many of them are difficult or impossible to identify from photos, but happily it turns out that E. nitidicollis is one of the good guys. His main identifying features are a yellow face, bright orange antennae set in an orange patch, and a dark wedge in front of his eyes that doesn't reach his antennae; and while these are pretty much diagnostic, confirmation comes from the fact that there are black hairs mixed with the yellow on his scutellum.

Steven Falk describes Epistrophe nitidicollis as widespread and frequent, but rarely common. It likes woodland margins, which is presumably why this one was sitting in my wooded garden, and the flight season peaks in late May and June, when adults can be found feeding from hawthorns, roses and umbellifers. The larvae eat aphids on a range of broadleaved trees and shrubs.