It's official - I'm 10% Professional...

Regular readers of this blog (yep, all three of you...) will by now know that I have dedicated this year towards improving my beetle and fly recognition skills. I am in loose cahoots with beetle-bothering guru Mark Telfer, dipteran demigod Tim Hodge and all 'round loser nice fella Gilbert's Ghost. Between us, we have been seeing and identifying a fair few of the dipteran species and families on offer. I'm just happy not to be at the back of the pack at this midway stage in the year. Surprised, but happy. 

Living this far north, I have had to reconcile myself to the fact that there are several beetle and fly families of a more southernly disposition that just do not occur up here, whilst other families that do extend this far north may only have a handful of species available for grabs. Today I encountered just one such example.

Scanning through my 'missing' British dipteran families, I quickly realised that I was in severe danger of entirely missing seeing a beefly or a robberfly this year. A ridiculous, possibly even unthinkable, situation were I still living in the south of England. But up here..?

Today I found myself in a ruined churchyard near Dunvegan, the site of a great many MacLeod burials. Thanks to Covid-19, the whole area has remained unmown/strimmed this year, resulting in a lovely grass-dominated meadowscape full of flies and bugs (and ticks...) All of a sudden, I found myself eye-balling a smallish robberfly sat on a headstone. Robberfly! That was on my shortlist of absentees, I needed this beast in a tube. I quickly looked around, there were no living, grave-visiting MacLeod's in sight. I unlimbered my net, swung...and missed! Damnit! Headstones, it transpires, are not ideal objects with which to swing a net into/across. Who knew...

Muttering at my inept use of the net, I wandered back and forth before spying a second robberfly sat on a low metal railing. Another eminently awkward-to-swipe-a-net-over object which would doubtless result in another miss. Happily, it relocated into long grasses and the net performed its job admirably. 

At this stage I had no idea what I was looking at, other than it being some sort of a small robberfly. But check out those hind tarsal segments - you ever seen anything like that before? I certainly hadn't. A quick flick through my copy of British Soldierflies and their Allies offered up Leptarthrus as a likely candidate and indeed this is what it keyed through to.

There are only two British species in this genus. One has entirely black tarsi and the other exhibits largely orange tarsi. Unusually, there is a strong sexual dimorphism to be found in one of these species, whereby the males have a quite ridiculously thin and elongated hind metatarsus

Looks good for "a quite ridiculously thin and elongated hind metatarsus" to me!

This is a male Leptarthrus brevirostris, the only species of robberfly currently known to occur on Skye. Down south it is mostly associated with calcareous grasslands, whereas up here it is more of a woodland edge/long grass species. It would probably be very useful to DNA the populations, just in case there is more than one species involved here. 

I would definitely disqualify this fly from competing in any track events - I mean just look at the Oscar Pistorius blades it's packing! Probably best to keep it away from closed bathroom doors too....

So why am I now officially 10% professional? Well because Leptarthrus brevirostris is the 318th species of fly on my British PSL. Dave Gibbs is the Top Ranked dipterist on the site with a massive 3184 species of fly to his name. Hence I'm an entire tenth of my way there. Sheesh, it could take a  wee while to catch him up!