Rare and less rare

It always amazes me what you find when you are not really expecting to see anything unusual.  Considering that our wildlife and their habitats are in such decline, we may get amazed far less often.  I photographed a couple of unusual flies recently and I thought one was a soldier fly and had no idea what the other one was.  It turns out that the soldier fly was indeed a soldier fly but not the common one I thought it was, in fact, though it is a European species it is very rare in the UK.  The other one that I thought was unusual was in fact fairly common.

Ornate Brigadier - Odontomyia ornata

The rare one was Odontomyia ornata or the ornate brigadier.  This one was sat on a yellow flag iris that a neighbour had given me and was just put in a corner of the pond waiting until I could plant it in its final position.  The most striking feature of the fly was the spotty face between the eyes.

Ornate Brigadier - Odontomyia ornata

Broad Centurion - Chloromyia formosa

The common one was on some wild forget-me-not in the tiny patch of garden that we like to call our annual meadow.  This too was a soldier fly - a broad centurion, Chloromyia formosa. This was a male.  The species is sexually dimorphic with the males having a bronze abdomen and the females a metallic green abdomen.  The most striking feature of this fly was the hairy eyes. a distinguishing feature of the species.

Knotted Hedge-parsley - Torilis nodosa

Yesterday, I was walking along the sea wall at Pett Level, doing a wildflower survey for the short-haired bumblebee reintroduction project.  This can get a bit tedious especially when you are seeing a lot of the same species time after time.  So I was delighted to notice a plant that I didn't recognize.  The flower looked a bit like an umbellifer, but instead of standing tall, it was in a low sprawling clump.  Despite the distinctive nature of the plant, it took me a long time to find it in the flower book because the illustration looked nothing like the plant, almost as though the illustrator had never seen one growing (maybe he hadn't).  It was knotted hedge-parsley, not a rarity but in decline.  The one thing that distinguished this umbellifer from others for me was not the small size but the way it has several flowers growing up the stem, each one opposite a single leaf.  I guess that's how it got it's 'knotted' name.