For the first time this year, the garden was literally humming with flying insects, and you could almost see it lift its head, drop its shoulders, take a long, deep breath, and stride out into spring. Or maybe that was just me.
R and I did several hours of gardening this afternoon, but I spent much of the rest of the day hunting invertebrates – and much of this evening processing the resulting couple of hundred image files. Most of these were only ever intended as record shots, but I’m posting two of my favourites out of the handful I’ve kept.
The main image is a female Eristalis pertinax, taking a grooming break in the bell of a daffodil. Because they rarely seem to attract insects, I merely gave a casual glance to the daffodil clump as I was walking past, and the sight of this large drone fly caused me to do a double-take, and rapidly back up to grab a couple of photos – severely breaking the No sudden movements rule, but luckily not putting her to flight.
My second photo is one of the dark-edged bee-flies (Bombylius major) that suddenly turned up in every corner of the garden today. This one has separated eyes and is therefore a female, but I recorded several of both sexes over the course of the day. I find bee-flies a little frustrating to photograph because they tend to settle in tangled vegetation, but this one chose to bask on some leaf litter in the late afternoon sunshine down in the wild garden, and on balance (with the usual caveats) I’m not too unhappy with the image.
