Inevitable springtails

There are few certainties in a year of wildlife watching, but one of them is that, at some point in January, I'll get fed up of not seeing any insects, and go springtail hunting. Well today was that day for 2016, with the weak winter sunshine enough to tempt me out into the garden. The first insect to hove into view was not a springtail though, but instead a barkfly, a less troublesome relative of the booklice.

This one didn't look like any of the, admittedly limited in number, barkflies that I've seen before, so I headed to the UK barkfly recording scheme website to see if I could figure out what it was. It turned out to be a fairly distinctive species, Trichopsocus brincki, which according to the website is a scarce species in England and Wales.

Trichopsocus brincki

Flush with that success I soon found and took some bad photographs of my first springtail of the year, the linear species Orchesella cincta, with its distinctive dark band. On a nearby bush I found another couple of species, a cute little globular Dicyrtomina species, and another linear species Entomobrya intermedia. The Collembola pages on the University of Roehampton website are a very useful resource for information on these tiny but fascinating insects.

Orchesella cincta

Dicyrtomina species (I susspect ornata, but the dark marking at the back of the abdomen isn't visible enough to be certain)

Entomobrya intermedia

With that my time was up and I headed back inside, pausing briefly to photograph another barkfly that had landed on the back door. The photos are too rubbish to bother showing, but showed enough detail to allow to identify it as the common species Ectopsocus briggsi, my second new barkfly of the day!