Looking at flies

I’ve been thinking about my blog title, taking a closer look, and why I’m writing it.  On a practical level it’s helped me take more note of what I’m doing.  By writing about it and recording it in a semi-public way I’ve made myself a record, which is becoming useful for the projects I’ve been writing about. 

And taking a close look at the natural world is something that is always worthwhile, which takes me to my nasty fly photo.  I took this picture in the summer, having found these dead flies and thinking there was something odd about them but not sure what.   Then I bought Peter Marren’s new book, Mushrooms, published by the wonderful British Wildlife Publishing (who take looking at the natural world as seriously as it deserves).  Flicking through and looking at the photos I found one like mine of a dead fly.  The text told me it was infected by a fungus, Entomophora muscae¸ which invades the fly’s system and affects its behaviour so its dying act is to climb to the top of long grass, where the fungus bursts out of the fly and throws its spores into the wind so it can infect some other unlucky insect.  Not a pretty way to live, but effective and, to my mind anyway, wonderful.  But to discover wonders like fly killing fungus you need to look.  I can’t congratulate myself on knowing what it was when I first saw it, but I can credit myself for seeing it and recognising it as something out of the ordinary.  That’s what looking is all about.