Hairy

This morning I cut back some more shrubs - increasingly grateful for the powered secateurs that make the job so easy - and then did some general garden tidying, and planted up the new heucheras on the patio. By the time I called a halt to the useful part of the day the sky was threateningly dark, and most of the few bees and flies I'd noticed earlier had disappeared. So I was pleased to find this darkly handsome drone fly, Eristalis pertinax, on the honeysuckle in the secret garden, where I suspect he's been overwintering.

Eristalis pertinax is quite a hairy hoverfly, but it always seems to me that the early spring males are especially so, and this one is so furry that he's not far from the shagginess of the summer species Cheilosia illustrata. All that hair will be helping to insulate him from the current cold snap, and with luck he'll make it through to the warmer spring days when the females of the species will begin to appear.

Despite a slow shutter speed, this was very nearly an extremely well-focused shot - the only problem being that Mr. E. pertinax moved his right middle leg during the exposure. The motion blur was quite distracting, but whereas usually in these circumstances I just shrug my shoulders and delete the image, this one has too much in its favour for me to be happy discarding it. So I reduced the blur - judiciously, I'd like to think - with Topaz software.