Learn about flies

Hi all. I have been photographing flies in my North Devon Garden for two years now and there are a  lot more than I thought there were ! Even the ones I thought were straight forward eg Bluebottles and Greenbottles are more varied that I thought. So I am a beginner but I am slowly starting to learn more about them but do rely on trying to ID from photos which does make it extra hard but still interesting. I I record any I can ID and have a lot of help from the Hoverflies and Diptera facebook pages with this .

This is the male beaten from the same shrub as the three females in my previous post. No sign of any brown spot in the wings. I have tentatively keyed this out as S. pumilus?

Once again, any help would be greatly appreciated.

I found three females of a Dolichopodid beating a very dense shrub in a garden in North Wiltshire on 21 December. They all have a faint but definite brown spot in the forewing, unfortunately this does not show up very well in my photo! Using the out of print handbook available on the RES website, they key quite confidently to Syntormon macula. There was also a male Syntormon but this lacks the brown spot.

is it possible to confirm from my photo? Thanks in advance for any help.

I've got a series of 5 male and 5 female muscids from Craig Cerrig Gleisiad a Fan Frynych NNR in the Brecon Beacons. They seem to be the same species, based on several shared characters. All the males and a few of the females were hilltopping at the summit of Fan Frynych and at the nearby cairn, with the remaining females captured at the mire in the basin of Craig Cerrig.

Hello everyone,

My next fly I presume is a cranefly. Photo 1 is one specimen and photos 2 & 3 are a different specimen. Are they the same species though, I wonder? Does anyone know which species? Or family if not? Does it have short palps?

Many thanks in advance,

Vanessa

I have some flies that were recovered from a conservatory where they have died and dried out. They would be a great resource for me to practice keying out diptera.

What is the best way to store/sort desiccated specimens like this? Can they be softened enough to pin or is it better to mount them on points?