Sun lover

It drizzled on and off for most of the morning, so I occupied myself with indoor stuff, including some cooking for the freezer. Half way through the afternoon the sky lifted, and for a couple of hours the sun even put in occasional brief appearances, so I went out with the camera feeling confident that all the inverts would now be coming out to play. Sadly though, I was wrong. Pickings were slim, and even after trudging right round the parish I had very little to show for my efforts.

Best of the day was this hoverfly, which I spotted on the pendulous sedge by the wildlife pond. Helophilus pendulus has been given a variety of common names - Sun Fly, Tiger Hoverfly, Tiger Marsh Fly, and even The Footballer (because of its stripy jersey - geddit?) - but none of them has really caught on, except among the kind of people who rail on social media about the fact that They-Don't-Do-Latin-And-Why-Can't-The-Experts-Stop-Talking-In-Poncy-Jargon-And-Instead-Be-More-Considerate-And-Call-Things-By-Names-Ordinary-People-Can-Remember?

Everyone else just calls it Helophilus pendulus.

An interesting thing about this species - though only if this is the kind of stuff you find interesting, obviously - is that it breaks the usual rule of thumb that in hoverflies females have widely separated eyes, whereas the eyes of males meet on the top of the head, like a monobrow. In H. pendulus both sexes have separated eyes, which makes them harder to tell apart. Females are considerably bigger than males, but that only helps if you have a couple to compare - in which case you can probably work out which is which anyway. Faced with a single specimen you need to look at the shape of the abdomen, which in females is fairly straight-sided and ends in a conical point, and in males is rather tapered and has a bristly genital capsule at the end. For reasons I've never bothered trying to fathom, those tell-tale bristles almost always appear to lie off-centre, and in my experience they're generally angled to the right. I suspect there's a joke lurking in there somewhere, but on mature reflection I think I'll leave it alone.