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Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 57
During 2021 I was invited to undertake survey work in Raydon Great Wood, near Hadleigh, by Juliet Hawkins, a freelance Conservation Advisor. Juliet has been working with the wood’s owner and site managers to record wildlife as the site recovers from its previous coniferisation and subsequent clearance. It is now being restored to seminatural broad-leaved woodland and largely comprises light, open woodland with a good ground flora. Whilst largely private, a right of way crosses the south-western corner of the wood and the popular Hadleigh Railway Walk also cuts through the wood. Although ostensibly there to record bees and wasps, a few other invertebrates were also collected. This included a moderately small hoverfly, which I tentatively identified as a male Meligramma euchromum. This was subsequently confirmed by Chris Sellen via the UK Hoverflies Facebook page, to whom my thanks are due. Although listed as a nationally rare species (RDB3) by Falk (1991), it is currently considered to be Nationally Scarce (Ball and Morris, 2014). It quite widespread south of the Thames from Dorset to Kent and known from a handful of records northwards to Lancashire, but this fly is seemingly barely known in East Anglia. Th UK Hoverfly Recording Scheme shows a 1959 record for Ordnance Survey map square TL65, which straddles the Cambridgeshire/Suffolk border, but the precise location of this site is not known, so this 2021 capture appears to be, at the very least, the first modern Suffolk record, if not the absolute first. Diptera recorder Peter Vincent is not aware of any other records of this species in the county. Meligramma euchromum is a fly of woodland and scrub edges, rides and glades. The larvae are thought to predate aphids living on trees and bushes, whilst the adults are found in sunny woodland locations, basking on sunlit leaves and visiting flowers of Blackthorn, Hawthorn and Wood Spurge. References Ball, S. G. & Morris, R. K. A. (2014). A review of the scarce and threatened flies of Great Britain. Part 6: Syrphidae. Species Status 9: 1-130 Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Peterborough. Falk, S. (1991). A review of the scarce and threatened flies of Great Britain (part 1). Research and survey in nature conservation 39. Nature Conservancy Council. Adrian Knowles, Jessups Cottage, London Road, Capel St Mary, Suffolk IP9 2JR
Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 57 (2021)
Adrian Knowles
MELIGRAMMA EUCHROMUM (DIPTERA, SYRPHIDAE) NEW TO SUFFOLK ADRIAN KNOWLES