Sawflies to look for in March

After a long winter, and especially after a snowed-in first week of March, I’m looking forward to some warmth. As it’ll be my first spring as county sawfly recorder, I thought I ought to work out which are the first species we should be on the look-out for. So I’ve spent a couple of evenings going through ‘Benson’ and ‘Quinlan & Gauld’ {note to self – I’ll need to do a blog post soon on the identification literature}, and tabulating the flight-period information contained therein. That is, in the identification keys where you get to a species, it gives details of range, status, larval food-plants and flight-period, e.g. under Cladius pectinicornis Benson gives ‘V-IX’ (i.e. May to September). It’s half a century out of date, likely to be affected by climate change, range spread and taxonomic revisions (I may well be missing some post-Benson spring species from this article), but it’s the best I’ve got access to. You have to start somewhere.

Click on the link to read the rest of the article: Sawflies of Norfolk: Sawflies to look for in March