ChrisR ← Chris' blog

Observing orchids

Apr

2015

Recently I have been helping with a project called Orchid Observers, at the Natural History Museum. The aim is to get members of the public to send in photos of 29 key species and also participate in a crowd sourcing project to help us check transcribed data on old herbarium sheets and help to confirm ...

Sloe gin – my recipe

Mar

2015

My first batches of sloe gin are ready to drink and are tasting pretty good so I think I can rough out my recipe now. Picking … Start scouting for sloes in hedgerows at the end of September – look for bushes with plenty of healthy fruit – not shrivelled, dry berries. Sloes should be ...

Review of commercial sloe gins 1

Feb

2015

This winter I have been making liqueurs with hedgerow fruits – things like sloe & damson gins and vodkas but also variations with hawthorne berries, white bullaces, quince and crab-apples. As part of my research I decided to rigorously “test” some of the commercial competition – brands such as Gordon’s, Greenall’s, Heyman’s and Sipsmith all ...

Sarcophaga carnaria group male genitalia 1

Nov

2014

I made this photo a little while ago, from my own specimens of the British Sarcophaga carnaria group (carnaria, variegata & subvicina). I posted it on Facebook and it went down very well with dipterists so I thought I’d post it here and give it a proper home 🙂

Tarassus shannoni confirmed from Colombia

Nov

2014

A little while ago I posted about a strange fly that had been shown to me at the Natural History Museum. It looked clearly like a phasiine tachinid but it lacked hypopleural bristles, which would normally mean that it would key as a muscoid, not an oestroid fly. It’s a very perplexing specimen but at ...

The first female of Alvamaja chlorometallica Rognes, 2010 found in Romania

Nov

2014

This autumn my friend Alexandru Pintilioaie in Romania sent me a batch of flies, including one metallic rhinophorid. We both agreed that it looked very odd and interesting so I took some photos on the photo-stacking system at the Angela Marmont Centre (NHM) to thank him. European rhinophorids are not really my group so I ...

Tachinids from La Palma

May

2013

I received a really interesting parcel today from a friend who holidayed in La Palma earlier this year. He had spotted some Tachina that looked quite different from the run-of-the-mill Tachina fera so he took a few, along with a couple of other tachinids. On close examination, and after taking advice from Peter Tschorsnig, they ...

Serious flooding at Moor Copse

Mar

2013

Stopped in at Moor Copse on the way home today to check out how high the river is. Well, the answer is – VERY! Tidmarsh village flooded last week, after yet more rain, and one week on the water has receded from the woodland but it is still right up to the top of the river bank. ...

Some nice Venezuelan tachinids 2

Dec

2012

Just had time to look at a box of Venezuelan tachinids sent to me by my good friend Jose Manuel Ayala. There are plenty of complete unknowns but a few look like familiar friend: a beautifully marked Zelia sp. (#2 on the top row) & Cylindromyia sp, (#5 on the middle row).

Cretan and Dutch tachinids

Jun

2012

Today I will be working on a nice little batch of tachinids sent to me my Ruud van der Weele and collected by him in Crete and at home in the Netherlands. They are mainly a nice mixture of typical southern European genera (Gymnosoma, Cylindromyia, & Eliozeta). Many thanks to Ruud for his generous donation! 🙂 ...

More Romanian tachinids

Jun

2012

Here are the last of Alexandru’s batch of Romanian tachinids, caught in 2010. They spent a long time in alcohol so they are not in the best of condition but most of them should be easy enough to identify, I hope! There are lots of Tachina, a few Nowickia, Thelaira, Solieria, Billaea, Ectophasia, one Cylindromyia and absolutely ...

Dinocampus coccinellae at Hartslock

May

2012

Last weekend, on a quick (and rather cold) trip to Hartslock, I discovered a 7-spot ladybird that had been attacked by Dinocampus coccinellae, a parasitic wasp. The wasp lives inside the ladybird eating its non-vital organs until it is ready to pupate. Then the wasp larva cuts the nerves to the ladybirds legs so that it ...

New Forest – May 12th

May

2012

Here are some photos from the Dipterist’s Forum Spring field meeting to Denny Wood in the New Forest.

Something from Yves 2

Feb

2012

This week has been a good one for deliveries – today I received a parcel from my friend Yves. This is part of a batch from Nouragues, French Guiana, collected by Stephane Brule a few years ago. My first impressions are that the material has a lot of dead leaves and it seems to have ...

A Venezuelan delivery… 1

Feb

2012

This week I have been working on a batch of Venezuelan tachinids, kindly sent to me by Manuel Ayala (see right). They are a lovely mixture of species collected my Manuel since the 1960s – all hand netted so they are in quite a good condition. The highlights of the batch are definitely the male ...

A new objective – Lomo 8x 0.20 1

Feb

2012

Received a nice little Russian microscope objective today from Haworthiaworld on eBay – a Lomo 8x 0.20 finite (I assume 160/-). I wasn’t expecting much from a £7 lens but it seems to have some promise. I have just finished a few test stacks and, my incompetence aside, the lens seems to be up to ...

Morphos

Jan

2012

As a quick follow-up to the “More butterfly wings…” post I thought you might like to see full-sized images of the butterflies used in the tests – starting with the most glamorous ones – the Morpho butterflies. The intense, metallic blue colours on a Morpho are not caused by pigments but instead are iridescence caused ...

More butterfly wings… 1

Jan

2012

I got an unexpected “gift” the other day of a Melles Griot 16x/0.32 160/0.17 microscope objective lens. I had ordered the 10x version (which is probably all I need in terms of magnification) but the eBay seller sent me the wrong one – but, being a nice chap, he said he’d refund me and I ...

Christmas in Dorset

Dec

2011

Have just come back from a lovely, relaxing trip to my parent’s for Christmas … lots of chatting, eating and (a little) drinking, all in the beautiful surroundings of deepest Dorset. Mum treated us to a massive array of delicious food and we all pitched in as much as possible. Then when it wasn’t raining ...

Butterfly wings 1

Dec

2011

One of the standard ways to test a macro photography set-up is to photograph a butterfly’s wing and then show the image as a crop at the maximum digital zoom. Here are a few photos taken with my EL-Nikkor 50mm f2.8 lens reversed on bellows to give 3:1 magnification on the sensor: These photographs have ...

Tachinid Recording News

Thelyconychia solivaga January 23, 2015
Recently I have been working on adding a new species to the British list to our key. Thelyconychia solivaga is a small tachinid that seems to live on fairly stony/rocky coastal sites and is very rare in the UK – in fact only 3 specimens have been found so far (by Laurence Clemons in Kent […]
The problem with Phryxe … January 20, 2015
The genus Phryxe contains a few common species (nemea, vulgaris & heraclei) and a few very rare ones (magnicornis & erythrostoma). The key pulls out nemea first by the wide gap between the facial-ridge bristles and the descending parafrontals – wider than the width of antenna-3 plus the mustardy/yellow frontal area. Splitting off heraclei has […]
Gonia face colour January 20, 2015
In the keys to Gonia one of the couplets asks you to consider the shininess of the face but this can be a confusing thing to judge when you only have one specimen. In this mini article I have taken photos of the 2 choices to make it clear. The first thing to do is […]
Linnaemya picta, tessellans & rossica confusion features November 27, 2014
For many years Linnaemya picta had been confused with rossica because early workers (e.g. Fonseca) hadn’t tried using the European keys. Since the ‘discovery’ of picta in Kent it has spread across southern England as far as Bedfordshire, Oxfordshire & Berkshire and so now we have another fairly common black-legged species to confuse with tessellans. […]
Siphona urbana or geniculata? September 9, 2013
In Andersen’s 1996 book “The Siphonini (Diptera: Tachinidae) or Europe” he made several changes to the names of Siphona spp., which have proved a bit confusing. The changes (and subsequent reversions) illustrate a few nice aspects of modern taxonomy and so I thought I would write a little piece on what happened. Every species is […]