I took a quick break from the beetle backlog today and had a quick look at a couple of flies that I'd recently picked up. The first was from Panshanger Park in Herts and was a nice fat Tachinid. I got to a tentative ID relative quickly through a process of picture matching and squinting at online keys. With flies there's a whole load of new terminology to get your head round and at my advanced age learning new technical names is always going to be a struggle!
Anyway, I was quite confident that this was Linnaemya vulpina. And the recording scheme organiser, Chris Raper agreed. The densely hairy eyes, protruding mouth edge, pale basicosta and orange femur are diagnostic. Result.
The second fly was picked up today and was a new robberfly for me and given my previous record on keying these I was up for it. This proved less easy.
My first issue was that the arista at the end of the antennae had broken off, leading me initially down the wrong bit of a couplet. I soon realised my mistake and headed down the correct bit, but I soon got confused by the amount of orange on the femora. I think it is Machimus atricapillus aka the Kite-tailed Robberfly, but have stuck it on the appropriate Facebook group for confirmation or otherwise.
The blog title inspiration takes me back to my late teens. Happy times.😁
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