Second to Noon

Some while ago I bemoaned the lack of information to be had about one of my favourites flies – Mesembrina meridiana aka the Noon Fly.  This bonny matt black insect with unreal gold angular decorations on its head and a tasteful hint of gold on the wings bothered me because I could establish so little about its lifestyle other than it laid eggs in cow pats.  (See my earlier post here)

Phil Gates pointed me towards a book – though I thought he was having me on when he said it was called ‘Insects of the British Cow Dung Community’.  I mean, I know plenty of people who talk a load of cow manure but who in their right mind would write a book on it let alone give it such an evocative title.  Well, one fine chap and largely unsung hero called Dr Peter Skidmore of course – published by the Field Studies Council.  A hunt for the book proved fruitless as it was long out of print.  I forgot about it until Mel Lloyd posted on cow pats a while ago on her Sandy Wildlife blog.

To cut a long story short I now have my hands on a copy after handing over a deposit (sorry) to the library loans people.  What a gem it is and I suspect, between this blog and Mel's you haven't heard the last of it by a long chalk.

So.....I now know that the little female noon fly lays no more than 5 eggs in her whole short life.  These are laid one at a time, two days apart in soft fresh dung.  Trouble is that within two days any one cow dollop will have crusted over, so she is a one-egg-per-pat kind of girl.  It follows that if you were to find a lot of eggs in one pat they must each have been laid by a different fly.  Elementary my dear Watson.  (He never said that).

Within an hour in the nice warm steamy slop, the egg has hatched .  By the third instar stage, the larva turns carnivorous and munches its way through large numbers of maggots of the face fly (Musca autumnalis).  This fly is responsible for spreading various unpleasant diseases in cattle so you see, this delightful dipteran is actually the farmer’s friend.

Another Skidmore gem is that the noon fly maggot is the largest you will find in your average British cow pat and, he says,  is popular for that reason with both anglers and rooks. (Though somehow I can’t imagine many anglers fingering their way through fresh dung to look for noon fly maggots).  He omitted to mention choughs,  which make a very decent living by sticking their noses into cowpats rooting out goodies, no doubt including noon fly maggots, as I observed first hand on Colonsay. earlier this year.


(Distant) chough poking in a cow pat



Chough looking for a cow pat

So, a toast to Peter Skidmore, sadly no longer with us, for his splendid legacy and a plea to someone to reprint his book asap.


For posts from other noon fly fans try:-
The Living Isle
Martin's moths