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Eristalis arbustorum (Linnaeus, 1758)

Identification

Identification difficulty = 2. according to Ball & Morris, 2024¹

Biology

The larva is of the 'long-tailed', aquatic type, and is associated with shallow standing water including wet, decaying organic matter around ponds and ditches, farmyard manure heaps and silage runoff. Adults are usually found visiting flowers in open situations such as woodland rides, hedgerows, meadows, road verges and urban wastelands. It is a frequent visitor to gardens.

Flight period

The following plots show the number of unique records per week that were not reported to be of eggs, larvae or pupae.

Distribution

This is a very widely distributed species that is almost certainly occurs more widely in north-west Scotland than records suggest.

Trends

The following plots show the Frescalo TFactor vs year and a map of the rescaled frequency (all records) for the species. For an explanation see here.