The volunteers were in today and we spent the morning putting up some new fencing and the afternoon working on the hides to get them in shape for reopening. Along the way we saw a few butterflies and loads of damselflies, the first species of the year, sometimes appearing in late March, is the large red damselfly and there are still lots on the wing.
A few warm days have made a real difference to the insects and there are a good few hoverflies out now, it has been a bit of a long wait for them this year. There are several wetland specialist species, one such is Anasimyia transfuga, seen today at the Centre pond.
There are a lot of species of generally black hoverflies, almost all of them in the large genus Cheilosia, their similarity and number often make identification a bit time consuming, but I think this one, also on water dropwort, is Cheilosia variablis.
A lot of the insects around the pond can be seen on the hemlock water dropwort or yellow iris. The iris are especially favoured by the various species of reed beetles, all of which seem to look very similar, so I am not going to commit to which one these are.
Blashford Lakes Nature Reserve 