Two events
Hello everyone,
Hope the hovers have come out for you in the recent warm weather!
There are two things I'd like to tell you about. One is 'Annotation Sunday' as suggested in this forum post. The basic jist is that some people are challenging themselves to add 25 or more annotations to observations each Sunday. As far as UK hoverflies are concerned, determining the sex is quite easy in most genera, and it's a great activity for beginners to get familiar with the variety of hoverflies. Information about how to determine the sex of a hoverfly can be found here. You can use the links on the URLs page to find all the UK hoverflies needing sex annotations. (Life stage annotations are all but done, and life stage should not be added to pre-2024 observations please due to this problem).
Secondly, October will mark the start of what I refer to as 'identification season', (when it's easier to do IDs than make observations!). I'd like to suggest that we use October to tackle the observations that have not yet been identified to Genus - there are just over 3000 of these. Again, a link to all of these observations can be found on the URLs page. This is another great activity for beginners, because you're not so often making observations research grade, which takes a little pressure off. Many observations in this category will be impossible to identify further: Here's what to do in that situation. Resources for identifying hoverflies can be found here. You'll be pleased to hear that the third edition of the very accessible WildGuide to hoverflies is now available!
It doesn't matter how many or how few you do, so long as it's fun! And you don't have to know the species: if you can move something from family to subfamily, or from tribe to genus or whatever, that's great.
My plan after October is to suggest particular genera to focus on each month. So this will set us up well for that!
All the best.
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