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Jeremy Early
Sightings of the Drab Wood-soldierfly - Solva marginata (Meigen, 1820) at Stonham, Suffolk in July 2024 The attractive Xylomyid, the Drab Wood-soldierfly - Solva marginata (Meigen, 1820), is reasonably widespread over the southern parts of the UK. Although previously thought of as uncommon, it may actually be slightly more frequent than that but is generally seldom numerous where it does occur. Just after mid-July 2024, I was contacted by Graham Denny who farms at Stonham in central Suffolk with some pictures of a distinctive-looking fly he had taken on his phone. Graham is an award- winning conservation-minded farmer who has spent 40 years nurturing the habitat necessary for Turtle Doves and other farmland birds to thrive as well as bees, butterflies and all sorts of other insects on his land. Graham has a particularly good eye for noticing wildlife of all sorts and his pictures clearly showed he had a specimen of S. marginata which was of interest straight away. There are eleven post-1882 records for S. marginata in Suffolk (Vincent, 2021). These include several records from the eminent Claude Morley in the first half of the 20th century and then only a couple in the subsequent decades. There are slightly more records into the 21st century including a pair of dead specimens collected for me from a conservatory in Ipswich by Evie Swanton in 2019. The last entry on iRecord is from 2020 by Gary Lowe in Boyton near Woodbridge. Therefore, Graham’s subsequent communication a few days later that there were now six specimens dancing around on a sunny bit of hedge prompted me, at Graham’s invitation, to go and have a look myself on July 20. Sure enough, when we walked along the sunny side of the said riverside hedge, we soon saw several small black and yellow flies flitting from leaf to leaf in an apparent ‘dance’ or presumably lekking or territory defending we thought.
Drab Wood-soldierfly Solva marginata.
Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 60 (2024)