A Photographic Guide to Flies of Britain & Ireland – Steven Falk, Gail Ashton, Rory Dimond & Peter Creed (Pisces Publications, 2026)

Flexi-bound, 416 pages, over 1,500 photos & 1,100 maps
Full price £28.95: better prices are available from some natural history booksellers

It is 75 years since there was last a popular and widely accessible guide to the flies of Britain. This was Colyer & Hammond’s Flies of the British Isles published in 1951. Pisces Publications have just published a successor: A photographic guide to Flies of Britain & Ireland. It fills a substantial gap to enable us to start to identify and learn about a wide range of Flies, the Diptera. Some other insects have ‘flies’ as part of their name but belong to a different Order, such as Dragonflies that belong to the Order Odonata.

The biologist JBS Haldane was said to have explained to a group of theologians that studies of nature implied about God that “He has an inordinate fondness for beetles” because across the world there tend to be more beetle species than in any other Order. This ‘quote’ is widely used but its source in print is untraceable. In Britain & Ireland there are many beetle species but far fewer than flies. The Order Coleoptera (beetles) has 4,131 species, but we have far more species of Diptera (two-winged flies): 7,283 fly species.

In the 75 years since Flies of the British Isles was published, a few identification guides have been published that cover a limited range of British flies: three produced by the British Entomological & Natural History Society (BENHS) cover the British species of: Hoverflies; Soldierflies & their allies; and Craneflies. These are identification guides with full and precise identification keys and pages of line-drawings with colour photos of set specimens. They are aimed at experienced entomologists, but are reliable and reasonably accessible.

We had to wait until 2013 for a more accessible guide to Hoverflies, when Princeton Wild Guides published Hoverflies of Britain & Ireland by Stuart Ball and Roger Morris for the more general naturalists, full of colour photos. This led to a new surge in popular interest, not least because these flies hover so can be seen clearly; and they tend to be large and colourful flies. British Hoverflies soon went into a second edition, then a third in 2024. With the coming of smartphones, interest in submitting records of hoverflies grew steeply. But there was still no new field guide to the full range of flies.

The lack of field guides to British flies was partially filled by A comprehensive guide to Insects of Britain & Ireland by Paul D Brock, published in 2019 by Pisces Publications. But this had room for only 2,250 insects of all Orders, so a relatively small proportion of these were Diptera. Paul Brock later wrote a different field guide, Britain’s Insects: a field guide to the insects of Britain & Ireland, published by Princeton in 2021 as a Wild Guide, with a clearer range of photos than in his 2019 book, and this covers 823 Diptera species, with larger photos.

This new book, A photographic guide to Flies of Britain & Ireland by Steven Falk, Gail Ashton, Rory Dimond & Peter Creed, was published in February 2026 and covers over 1,300 fly species. These are set out under 108 Families and are accompanied on each double spread by photos of between 6 to 9 species a page.

This book has 1,500 photos and 1,000 mini-maps of distribution. The list of contents uses the scientific name for each family, but the page headers throughout the book show English names for families on the page headers and scientific family names within each page. Scientific names for individual flies are shown, with common names alongside. On each double spread, photos are grouped on the right-hand page, with text about each species on the left-hand page, as well as mini-maps of distribution. This provides clarity and photos of sufficient size.

There are no keys included, so identification is by viewing the photos closely and checking the species description, which covers: size, habitat, distribution and season and, in relevant cases, the host of the species. For larger families there is a useful introductory section giving fuller information about their specific characteristics. Near the end of the book is a substantial 8-page Bibliography. Many of the publications listed here contain identification keys on specific Families of Diptera. For back-up, do look at the Dipterists Forum website at: https://dipterists.org.uk/home and https://dipterists.org.uk/weblinks. I expect that all four authors of this excellent book are Dipterists Forum members.

This species guide to Flies is concise, clearly-presented, well-illustrated, informative and portable. Although it includes only 18% of British Fly species, you would not want to carry five volumes of this size into the field and it does cover all the Diptera Families you are likely to find in Britain and Ireland. All British species are covered for some families: for other families a representative selection of species are included.

A final note: MKNHS members may be interested that the Foreword is by Dr Erica McAlister of The Natural History Museum who has twice in recent years been our speaker at MKNHS meetings.

Mike LeRoy
© MG LeRoy  April 2026