Field note on a warm summers evening in Doncaster.
On the airless, sultry evening of 31 July, with temperatures hovering around 25oC I took my tea into the back garden, into my own ‘bee-loud glade’. It was one of those evenings during the season of hot air-balloon races, when plump flying-ants, the Black Ants Lasius niger from beneath wonky paving slabs down the drive, were launching into their high-summer mating swarms.
I set up my folding chair between the garden pond, and a blousy clump of Great Willow-herb Epilobium hirsutum, this being earnestly worked by the local team of ginger Carder Bees Bombus pascuorum and the pond territorially patrolled by two competing and smartly striped Helophilus pendulus ‘Footballer’ hover flies.
Having cleared my plate of its baked potato, tuna, and vegetables (French and broad beans with chopped red onions), the empty platter, possibly the food residues or even the floral patterns*, seemed to attract a tiny 3mm black flying insect. This lively individual, a Lesser Dung-fly or Black Scavenger-fly Sepsis fulgens or punctatum, initially scooted around in a rather frenetic ant-like manner. After seemingly becoming familiar with its new environs it took up station on one of the plate’s printed floral swags, and as if standing to attention, proceeded to wave its wings around in a rather deliberate and presumably meaningful manner. Curiously, this semaphore-like behaviour took the form of the wings being waved about independently rather than in synchrony. The signalling was made the more conspicuous by its transparent wings each having a terminal black dot. This energetic, if lonesome little individual, after performing its intriguing gyrations for several minutes on its high status platform (this tableware having a Royal Charter no less), failed to attract any impressed females or even any competing males and departed for pastures new. What ‘s more, what entomological language, even dipterous haikus had I, this privileged primate with shelves of literature and the advantage of t’internet, failed to comprehend … well at least I hadn’t squashed my fellow traveller.
Meanwhile, a Wood Pigeon, oblivious of this little drama and unconcerned at my presence, noisily parachuted onto the scene within touching distance, to slake its thirst at the pond. Under the lowering sun, in the absence of the usual Swifts, spirals of Blackheaded Gulls and Starlings harvested flying-ants out of the hazy sky and in the absence of balloons, a mewing Buzzard, a mere speck at the edge of space, drifted past on a late afternoon thermal.
*The dinner plate was a well-used example of Royal Albert ware, one of Stoke’s best, featuring the design ‘Moss Rose’ with swags of pink roses and blue speedwells decorating the fluted rim.
C.A. Howes (2024)