Cliffe pools at low tide, Mid-November

The weather was really rather good again today, with spells of reasonable sunshine and warm and dry whether the sun was shining or not. Common Darter, hoverflies, bee? Lots of LBJs, good numbers of pochard, tufted duck, little grebes, great crested grebes, coot, little egrets, grey herons, redshank, lapwings.
The dredger Antwerpen was off-loading at a rate of knots, and you can see the dredgings being fed from the stern.

and they are then fed up the escalator to be dumped in windrows

Along the seawall, there was a good crop of shaggy inkcaps, Coprinus comatus, of which I took one picture of a youngish head:

On the way back to the car, by one of the access gate-bars, I came across a hoverfly concentrating on a few flowers, which might be a Platycheirus, possibly Platycheirus albimanus. The combination of grey spots and a small dark body points towards the greyer marked species of Platycheirus, and the black shiny thorax with an accompanying black scutellum is a fairly diagnostic cross-check that it really is Platycheirus, characteristics shared only with Melanostoma and Chamaesyrphus. Another nice point is the wing venation, with the long light brown stigma, clearly visible on the front margin of the wing (see further down below).

This sighting, together with another unidentified Syrphid patrolling a territory on the path, was really great as I had thought that the hoverfly season was pretty nearly finished, and I haven't been able to photograph any hoverflies for weeks. I therefore tried to catch this Platycheirus hovering in front of the flower:

It was clearly grey spotted, and a female. The overall shape and pattern looks pretty good for P. albimanus overall. However a word of caution here - the unsettled nature of the taxonomy of this genus, and the overall similarity of the females in general makes this identification a matter of probabilities rather than certainties and therefore somewhat tenuous.

The sternites, overall pattern and face shape seem to fit the pictures on the web - "Wild in Denmark" is a brilliant site for this sort of comparison, with really detailed pictures. The mid and front femora more or less fit available web pictures, but not fully, nor the description in Stubbs & Falk. I would have expected to see a bit more lightness and a clearer orange in these limbs. However this may be partly due to the lateness of the season. If this is a third brood individual, then it may be expected to develop darker shades in the lower temperatures available at the larval and pupal stages.

There are a number of other issues with the identification. The abdomen of this insect is quite swollen, and apparently much contracted in relation to the length of the wings. The wings therefore seem 20% longer than the abdomen. I have seen neither of these features in any of the photographs available on the web. The legs are also proportionately long and spindly. Again I realise what poor photos these are in relation to many others available, and I do wonder whether I should make more use of the tripod in this sort of situation. Incidentally, in the next photo there also seems to be a flea beetle buried head down in the flower:

In the next picture the light brown stigmas are clearly visible, which seem to be seen in most of the web pictures I have seen. Although not in the diagnostic keys, these are useful cross-check features - its always reassuring to find such useful characteristics borne out in practical identification.