Dance of the Drone-fly

Wild West Yorkshire nature diary, Monday 26th July 1999

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drone-fly A DRONE-FLY hovers in the sun by the marigolds. He (I assume this is the male because he seems to be guarding a territory) keeps darting off to check out any insect that comes within a couple of yards. He has a dog fight with a small hoverfly, which gives as good as it gets, bobbing back at him.

He has a habit of rubbing his back legs together as he hovers, grooming them, an action which reminds me of the Irish 'riverdance'.

woodland pathgall wasp? Evening sunlight filters through the branches of the Sessile Oaks along the woodland path. One pool of sunlight illuminates a single umbel if Hogweed, so I look closely to see what insects it has attracted. A small wasp, probably a gall wasp or ichneumon, feeds on the flowers.

marble galls on oak Marble Gall the home of the larval stage of Andricus kollari, one the gall wasps is turning from green to dappled red.

Out of the Past

early man Unfortunately my daily work rarely gives me the chance to sit in the wood drawing. Today I'm completing a time chart of the last 600 million years. As far as we can tell from the fossil record Hominids have been around for about two million years. On the scale of my chart that's less than the width of a little finger nail.

No-one would take the sponges, trilobites and dinosaurs on the diagram as symbolic as anything other than what they are. But put in a human figure and it presents all sorts of questions;

Male, Female? Black, White? Neanderthal or modern human? Whatever I do it won't please everyone. I end up with what looks like a caveman on his way to Disneyworld.

Richard Bell,
wildlife illustrator

E-mail; 'richard@daelnet.co.uk'

  
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