Sickle wasp

After whizzing off to the Farncombe Estate first thing for a haircut, I spent the rest of the morning fossicking around the garden with the twin flash on the camera, seeing what invertebrates I could find. It's so long since I did any flash macro that I'd forgotten the one huge advantage it has, outweighing all its downsides and irritations: you can photograph anything you can physically reach, however dark a corner it's inhabiting. Today nothing was beaten or swept from its chosen perch or roost, and everything was photographed as found.

I was walking underneath one of our bigger hazel trees when I noticed this wasp. I didn't recognise the species, though I thought it was probably an ichneumon, but many if not most of these aren't identifiable from photos, and I photographed it simply because I thought it was attractive, rather than from any expectation of being able to log a record. However it turns out that it's quite a well-known nocturnal sickle wasp: Ophion obscuratus, commonly called the Cream-striped Darwin Wasp. There are other similar ichneumons, but they lack the pale thoracic stripes you can see here. That said, it's recently been suggested that this species may need to be split, and all the recording organisations I've looked at are now treating it as an aggregate or complex.

Ophion obscuratus is described as 15-22mm in length, reddish-brown, with pale thoracic stripes and pale corners to the dark wing stigmata. The waist is slender and the abdomen narrow. It flies at night, and unusually it can be seen in most months of the year except for June and July. Females lay their eggs in the caterpillars of various noctuid moths, especially species in the genus Mythimna, and because of this they have no need of the long ovipositors which are characteristic of many ichneumon wasps.

I'm continuing to be pleased with my new flash system. The ability to move the flash heads around and angle them in different ways is helpful in reducing the dreaded specular highlights on the reflective carapaces of insects - though, as you can see in this photo, it doesn't completely eliminate them. I'll be adding better diffusers to the flash heads as soon as I can source some, in the hope of evening out the light still further.