It has been very ‘birdy’ in the last few days. Yesterday I went to a local lake with my girlfriend and we saw a really superb Red-crested Pochard – a possible released species but still quite unusual. Then today, while having our breakfast we saw 2 new garden species – a flock of 4 Redpoll on my bird feeders and a male Brambling in my Magnolia tree! Sadly my camera wasn’t handy to get some photos but hopefully they will be back in the next few days so I might update this post later
At long last I am very pleased to say that the OPAL cabinet project is finished! Yesterday I collected the final batch of drawers from Max at the NHM in London and slotted them into place – as in the photo
The observant amongst you will notice that I have only 36 drawers in the cabinets, not 40, but I have bought 4 extra drawers as ’spares’ for working on accessions outside the cabinet.
Many thanks again to everyone at OPAL, the NHM and the AES for helping make this aquisition go so smoothly. The cabinets are already proving to be incredibly useful and will revolutionize the way we work at the Tachinid Recording Scheme


Whilst at the NHM last week Max Barclay kindly sorted me out with some new unit trays for the OPAL-funded cabinets. I have spent a few days transferring the collection over to the new trays and this is the result:

I’m sure you’ll agree, they look really professional and they fit much better than the old, mismatched ones. Many thanks to Max for working late and helping to find and sort-out all the boxes etc.
Hopefully I will be able to go back next week and pick up the remainder of the drawers to finish off the project completely.


Categories: Field trips, Tachinids Tags: Acaulona, Adejeania, Belvosia, Cholomyia, Chrysotachina, Cylindrophasia, Epalpus, Eudejeania, Homogenia, Leschenaultia, NHM, Uramya
One of my favourite flies from my recent NHM visits is the amazingly marked Bibiomima handlirschi, a rare phasiine tachinid from Central & South America. This specimen was taken in the Panama Canal Zone in 1913.
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Bibiomima handlirschi (NHM, London)
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Bibiomima handlirschi (NHM, London)
This is a really intriguing little orange, rounded phasiine tachinid with very un-tachinid-like shaded wings, like a tephritid. A few species occur in North America.
This one keys rather awkwardly to Protodejeania echinata … the problems center around the first couplet in Curren’s 1947 key where the reader has to decide whether the upper calyptrae are “brownish” or “reddish or brownish yellow”. I hate couplets like this because all of those colours are gradients of the other and no clear way has been provided to make out where one finishes and the other starts.
Here is a nice specimen of Pararchytas decisa (male) – not the darkened wing bases and vein rm. I have yet to track down Norm Woodley’s revision* of this genus so the determination is tentative until I can see a description of all 3 species.
* Woodley, N.E. 1998. A revision of the genus Pararchytas Brauer and Bergenstamm (Diptera: Tachinidae). Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington 100: 409–420.
Southern England had another blanket of snow last night – about 40cm in my area, which is the most snow I have seen since I was a child. Of course, the town was pretty much at a standstill and most people didn’t go in to work because our infrastructure just isn’t set up for this kind of weather.
After lunch I braved the conditions and went out for a walk to see what the neighbourhood looked like:
Here’s a few photos from this Christmas – a few of us having our Christmas dinner and then some photos of the sea taken at West Bexington and Cogden Beach:
Last night we had one of the heaviest snow storms in many years and I woke to about 15-20cm of snow blanketting everything. Several friends have said they took hours to drive home from work last night and it seems that many people had to abandon their cars on the main road, rather than try to get up the hills to my road. At lunch time I walked down to the local shops and took a few photos:
Today I had the very great pleasure to open the latest parcel of interesting flies – this time from Martin Hauser, in California. Martin had sent a nice selection of North & South American tachinids along with 3 pantophthalmids. The tachinids are superb but I will post more about them later – today I concentrated on remounting and identifying the pantos, which had suffered a little in the Xmas post.
The identifications weren’t too difficult but the specimens were a bit greasy, which is a common problem with large-bodied insects and which can obscure valuable dusting features. Luckily the palpi and the ‘noses’ were intact and they provided some very useful secondary features. For instance, P.planiventris is a very dull and faintly marked species but it has a lovely pair of yellow, swollen-ended palps with pointed tips and a long ‘beak’ of a nose on the face. P.batesi also has a pointed ‘nose’ but luckily it has some quite distinct dark spots on the thorax. Lastly, P.argyropastus is a new species to me and has a quite distinctive protruding ‘nose’ with a rouded tip. Martin had showed me some lovely photos of a male in his collection that was almost entirely covered in silvery dusting. Sadly the new one is a female so it is much less well marked, with normal panto colours and some small silvery spots on the tergites.
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Pantophthalmus argyropastus (female), from Nicaragua
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Pantophthalmus argyropastus (female), from Nicaragua
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Pantophthalmus argyropastus (female), from Nicaragua
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Pantophthalmus batesi (female), from French Guiana
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Pantophthalmus batesi (female), from French Guiana
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Pantophthalmus batesi (female), from French Guiana
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Pantophthalmus planiventris (female), from Panama
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Pantophthalmus planiventris (female), from Panama
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Pantophthalmus planiventris (female), from Panama
This lovely 2cm long fly came from California, via Villu in Estonia
Paradejeania is a very distinctive genus with a single species – there are many large tachinids with strong abdomenal bristles but none with such a characteristic triangle on the tergites, made by the marginals and discals.