The sun fly alights on a bramble leaf and alters its position as if by the clockwise clicks of an invisible dial. Gold on black, black on gold, it radiates. The sun fly is one of the syrphid flies, a hoverfly of rough flowery places such as this verge of a long-abandoned railway line through the woods.
It’s a chunky little fist of bling, folding up a cut-glass wingspan of 25mm. Its thorax is black with three vertical yellow stripes – which has earned it the nickname of the footballer or the common tiger hoverfly. It presents a regal, black-banded backside of an abdomen with crescentic yellow markings like the folded gold of Saxon hoards.
The waspish mimicry may warn off predators – it looks dangerous – but this is a fine disguise for a gentle creature, here for the nectar and pollen of wayside flowers.
Helophilus pendulus may get its sun fly name by a misreading of Helos for Helios, but the translation from the Latin is “dangling marsh lover”. There is no nearby marsh, but there are springs and flushes oozing from the Edge, running into fields below the old railway line. In its larval youth, this sun fly sucked sustenance from the muck of a ditch but now, in a miraculous story of rags to riches metamorphosis, it is resplendent.
After a quiet drop of rain, the air under overhanging trees is fresh and makes a wonderful sounding chamber many miles long for the birds. But this is the summer opening of the festival of flowers – buttercup, campion, bramble, guilder rose, honeysuckle, bugle, elder, herb Robert, raspberry – to which the insects swarm.
There is a mass intoxication going on: small white and speckled wood butterflies, bumble, carder and mining bees, capsid bugs, leaf, click and pollen beetles, true flies, micro moths, hoverflies … they are many but far from enough. There is a sense of absence as if many of the insect populations have been dimmed or doused.
Yes, too much going on to worry about flies, but what kind of a perishing would it be if we only had each other?
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