Tasty

I've arrived home to a mountainous backlog of administrative tasks that mostly needed dealing with several weeks ago, and this morning I vowed to spend all day at my desk, getting stuck in. Fortunately, R has known me for four and a half decades now, and recognises rubbish when he hears it coming out of my mouth - because otherwise he might have ended the day Sad and Disappointed. 

To be fair, this image of a Marmalade Fly gorging on nipplewort pollen was taken during a rapid early morning foray around the garden, after which I did indeed retire to my desk. But it wasn't long before I heard the call of the wild, and by early afternoon I'd given in to it and was down at the Avon, rummaging around the bankside vegetation for insects. The fact that I wasted ninety minutes capturing nothing more interesting than the photos I'd already taken at home was neither here nor there: you have to be in it to win it, and if I hadn't gone I might have missed seeing something extraordinary.

Ahem. Did I mention that this is a Marmalade Fly? It's the most commonly recorded hoverfly in the UK, though numbers vary from year to year, and regular winter sightings lead experts to believe that it overwinters here. However it's also a migratory species, leaving southern Europe in the early spring and moving northwards in a rolling wave of migration, breeding as it goes, before returning south in the autumn. UK records of Episyrphus balteatus peak in late June and early July, when European migrants reach our shores, sometimes in huge numbers, and boost the native population. It's clear that this individual is freshly emerged, but there's no way of telling whether he's a native or part of the migrant wave.

There's a good blog about the Marmalade Hoverfly here, if you'd like to know more.