I wish this book had been available through 2025 when I was carrying out a year-long bioblitz of my garden. The Diptera is a very species-rich taxon, perhaps even richer than Coleoptera in world terms, and there are over 7000 UK species. I found them difficult to catch, difficult to photograph and then difficult to identify. Flies are difficult.
And so the feast of 1500 pin-sharp images of 1300 of the UK species is an amazing celebration of insect diversity from the craneflies to bee-flies, the gall-forming midges to hoverflies and the leaf-mining flies to dung flies. This book will help the naturalist on their way to identifying species but the authors are clear that further resources of keys and microscopes (and expert help) may be needed to clinch that final species identification.
Once you have this book in your hand, you cannot fail to be struck by the flies that have gone unnoticed in your life and you will probably begin to yearn to know more about the Pouting Woodlouse-fly, Semaphore Fly, Marmalade Hoverfly, Face Fly and Spotted-winged Drosophila. All are in my garden and so might well be in yours too, but they are all in this book.
The cover? It flies, photographically! I’d give the cover 9/10.
A Photographic Guide to Flies of Britain and Ireland by Stephen Falk, Gail Ashton, Rory Dimond and Peter Creed is published by Pisces Publications.
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