Drone fly stirs for the first feed of spring

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/09/drone-fly-stirs-for-the-first-feed-of-spring

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Winter winds had worked their way into the sills and splits in a wooden gate. Silver birch seeds and seed cases had been blown and wedged into every gap. Many more had been whisked through the bars into the lee of the west wind only to snag in spiders’ webs, and there they hung, in the grubby threads that had become necklaces of detritus.

It was only when I reached for the gate’s latch that I spotted drab spring nestling in the angle between two struts, brown on brown. We tend to make much of butterflies and bees, the colourful harbingers of the new season, while disregarding the quiet majority of life that creeps out of cracks and holes to resume its overshadowed existence.

This motionless insect, with its wings folded over its back, was a drone fly, a species of hoverfly named for its similarity to a male honeybee. This specimen of Eristalis tenax had evidently emerged from hibernation. Perhaps it was basking to gain a solar top-up before foraging for searching for nectar? Or maybe it was dead?

Standing too close, I unthinkingly gave the drone fly a blast of heat by breathing over the poor creature – probably the first proper warm air it would have felt in many months. It stirred with a slow, seductive, drawback of its leg, a hairy thigh caressing its bulbous abdomen. I pulled back a little and now saw its body backlit, showing a thorax with a thicket of fine, even-length, hairs.

Very carefully, I opened the gate and examined the fly from a different angle, this time without facing the sun’s reflective glare. I looked into the insect’s huge, dark eyes, though it was hard to empathise or connect with the matt and expressionless discs. But then its abdomen pulsed, a sudden flexing of its armour-like plates. It was readying itself to fly, feed and unwittingly pollinate the few flowers in bloom. A plain creature, undervalued and largely unnoticed yet essential to our very existence.