Hunting for a needle in the haystack

The crops are struggling towards harvest at the moment, with the wheat to the North of East Lock drying off nicely:

The field on the South side of the River had already been harvested, and the straw "rolled", under a violent sky:

On the path on the way down all the hogweed was swarming with Rhagonycha fulva,

but also attracted this Volucella pellucens:

Failed to find ANY sign AT ALL of the Shepherds Needle in the crop margin

White Hill

Wonderful Chalkhill Blue butterflies, and great flowers

Pembury Heath walk

Nice walk up from the water treatment works with plenty of flowers in the damp valley leading up to the conifers and heathland. Greater Birds Foot Trefoil, Lesser Medick, Tufted Vetch, Creeping Thistle, Spear Thistle and Marsh Thistle, Cut-leaved Geranium, Willowherb, Creeping Buttercup, Perforate St Johns Wort, Selfheal, Hogweed, a little Wild Angelica, Yarrow, Nettle, Bramble, Teasel, Agrimony, Pale Persicaria, Sedges and Rushes, Daisy, Cats Ear, Hawkweed, Ragwort, White Clover, Tormentil,

On the heathland I found the trailing St Johns Wort, Hypericum humifusum, as well as heather and the cross-leaved heath. By the cottage the clump of silverwed was still there. In amongst the pines there was little, but in other areas there was sweet chestnut coppice, some rhododendron, and birch absolutely everwhere. 

Southern Hawker and my first glimpse?

Might have seen one Purple Emperor flying high over the Knights Park Corner Oak for about half a second, but couldn't really tell!

Turning to the commoner woodland butterflies, here is a Comma, being very leaf-like indeed.

Here is a Speckled Wood, Pararge aegeria, also trying to look like a leaf:

and a rather brighter butterfly, a Gatekeeper,

and a very worn Meadow Brown, probably a male from the uniformity of the hind wing.

This is a male Southern Hawker, posing nicely for its photo, and confirmed on ispot. However it did look to me as though the light coloured patterning on the abdominal sections is all sky blue - which is supposed to be the rarer form.

This is a male Eristalis pertinax with its yellow front and mid tarsi, and a yellow basal section to the rear tibiae. It has also got a very clearly tapered abdomen, and a little bit of shading on the wing, all of which fits.

This one, another male, cannot be pertinax as it has dark front tarsi. However it should not really be arbustorum either, as it has a fairly clear face stripe, and no clearly swollen hind tarsi, although rubbed arbustorum can show dark on the face as well, and the swelling of the hind tarsi can be ambiguous. These two features are well seen in the next picture.

Difficult to get a good ID though, because the pictures aren't good enough. Does look like a small quadrate stigma perhaps, so one possibility is Eristalis interruptus, but this could never be a reliable ID at all.

Myathropa florea was also present in fairly good numbers, certainly better than I remember last year.

Silver Washed Fritillary

Today seemed likely to be sunnier, so it was back to Dene Park hunting the Emperor, but no luck again. However I saw a female Silver Washed Fritillary along the path from Knights Park Corner to Ringlet Corner, and then I think the same individual a little further on.These two photos were of this first one.

On the way back there was another individual by the Triangle. This one looked a little more worn at the edges, with a small nibble out of the left wing. Also I eventually worked out that this was a male, from the sex-brands. I think at least the second sex-brand away from its body has burst open (the white line), as designed for showering a female with scented scales, and thus indicates this insect's prior (hopefully successful) sexual activity. 

There were reasonable numbers of other butterflies around, including this Meadow Brown, probably a very worn female, unusually with two white spots!

By comparison this Gatekeeper looks very orange - if rather blurred in the first photo. This should be a male because of the dark smudge in the centre of the upper forewing:

This could be one of the fresh second brood of Speckled Woods, Pararge aegeria, with fantastic irridescent hairs close to the body.

and this is one of the very nice Ringlets, from the track leading up to Ringlet Corner.

Large Skipper. I would guess that this is a female, and rather worn.

Plenty of other things to see, such as a few Eristalis, including this rather nice Eristalis arbustorum - or is it?  

A dull Meadows South

Eristalis arbustorum on the Greensand Way

A short wander down the Greensand way path produced more Eristalis arbustorum than pertinax, somewhat to my surprise. I have seen a few of the rather dark females at Dene Park, and today I saw both males and females, so it was interesting to try to look at the details a bit more closely.

This is a close-up of the stigma on the wing, slightly blurred out towards or even beyond the junction of the Sc vein with the wing margin, as in the key.

These two photos are perhaps a slightly better view of the tergites pattern, showing how the dark patch on tergite two doesn't widen at the rear to block off the continuity of the yellow between two and three.

This is obviously a male, generally the more brightly coloured of the two sexes in this species I think. The antennae are sufficiently dark to fit the description of the species, although they may look lighter from different angles. Note also the overall clarity of the wings - apart from the stigma of course. Eristalis pertinax does I think have a bit of a wing cloud by comparison, another characteristic allowing me to separate out arbustorum from the pertinax I commonly see around Dene Park more easily.

Another feature that you can start to see is the rather nice white woolly look to the face. The lack of the face stripe is fairly characteristic of arbustorum within the genus, although wear does sometimes remove enough wool to produce a slight face stripe.

The picture below gives some idea of the "pied" nature of the legs, ivory on the tibiae and dark on the mid and fore femora and tarsi. Its not so obvious on the hind tarsus that the limb is dark on the apical half, but it is. I do think however that you can see the swollen nature of the substantial basal section of the hind tarsus below the tibia - if I've got all the sections of the limb correct! The dark fore tarsi of arbustorum contrast with the completely yellow tarsi of pertinax.

It is interesting to note their silvery hairs all around their bodies, on the dark parts of the legs, and on the eyes.

On the other hand this is one of the darker females,  most obvious first from their silvery tergite bands, then from the woolly white faces. Again note the "pied" look of the mid and fore legs, and the blurred stigma on both sexes! The other feature I think I am seeing is the white tufts of hair along the side of the thorax, again on both sexes, but I've not seen any reference to this in the books.

The next photo shows the lighter basal half of the rear tibia and the darker apical half, leading onto the obviously swollen metatarsus.

In the next photo you can just see the long hairs on the arista of the far antenna - this is one of my rather less bad pictures. The bicolouring of the hind tibia and the swollen meta-tarsus is, I think, convinging.

This is now some pictures of a male again, the first with a rather nice view of the woolly face and the trident structure part of the way up on the front of the pharynx:

This one is a great shot of the bicoloured rear tibia and the very definitely swollen metatarsus:

This is a fairly good photo of what in bees I think are called the tegulae, the joints that move the wings. In this species of Eristalis, the tegulae are noticeably black from the top, particularly with respect to the other features of the body. From the front they look as if they have a silvery pad on their front surface, as seen in the photo two above.