Fly

Cordelia, royal fair, turn yet once more; And ere successful Burgundy receive The treasure of thy beauties from the King, Ere happy Burgundy for ever fold thee, Cast back one pitying look on wretched Edgar.

Alas, what would the wretched Edgar with The more unfortunate Cordelia, Who in obedience to a father's will Flies from her Edgar's arms to Burgundy's?

Attend, my lords of Albany and Cornwall, With princely Burgundy.

We do, my liege.

Two-Winged Insects.

Diptera.

Years ago in Berlin My German landlady called me in as an expert to decide a controversy between her children and herself as to whether a frog had four legs or six.

It seemed strange to me then that a grown-up woman should not know the number of a frog's legs.

There are no teachers.

It's Lord of the Flies out there.

And, like, if you don't understand that the globe, the community of countries is Lord of the fucking Flies...

And the fact that you have a neighborhood where everybody plays together by the same set of rules and generally cooperates and settles their disagreements kind of reasonably, you don't realize how valuable that is until you get kicked out and you're in the fucking land of the jungles.

Uh,

Bees.

The Flies.

There's no Flies.

There's no Flies on you.

There's no team called the Flies.

Brentford.

Brentford,

Yet others thrive in tropical climates.

Biologically, mosquitoes are insects belonging to the order Diptera, the group of true flies.

Diptera literally means two wings because members of the group possess a single functional pair of wings.

Mosquitoes belong to the family Culicidae, which contain more than 3,500 known species.

A Swallow and a Spider.

A Spider that observed a Swallow catching Flies, fell immediately to work upon a net to catch Swallows, for she looked upon it as an encroachment upon her right.

But the birds without any difficulty break through the work, and fly away with the very net itself.

"Well," says the Spider, "bird-catching is none of my talent, I perceive." And so she returned to her old trade of catching flies again.

Read by Jonathan Kirk.

chapter two the insect world continued two-winged insects diptera years ago in berlin my german landlady called me in as an expert to decide a controversy between her children and herself as to whether a frog had four legs or six it seemed strange to me then that a grown-up woman should not know the number of a frog's legs yet there'll be many who read these pages who do not know how many wings a fly has and flies are much more important than frogs in fact the mosquito and the house-fly both included in the order of the flies probably cause more deaths and are more dangerous to human life

than

any other creatures in the world these portraits are of a few only of the vast myriads of forms of two-winged insects which haunt the world were i to photograph just one individual of each different species which inhabit the globe i would have to spend a lifetime doing it and when it was finished it would make five hundred volumes about the size of this one there should never be the slightest difficulty in telling a fly from other insects for there are no other two-winged forms although the flies are sucking insects their beaks lap up liquid food and are not at all like the beaks of the bugs in the great majority of flies the beaks resemble a trunk with curious fleshy folds or lips it is true some species like the mosquito have long sharp-pointed stylets which working up and down puncture the skin of plants and animals the larval forms of many flies are maggots those squirming often almost headless creatures that abound in rotting carcasses or decaying matter of all kinds and this is one of the reasons why less is known about the flies than about some others of the insect world which have selected less revolting birthplaces of course in such a gigantic family no general rules apply and still a maggot whether in an orange or a dead horse is most likely to be the larva of a diptera or two-winged insect the crane fly limnobia species every lover of the autumn woods must have noticed on some still october day in the little clearings in the woods these awkward long-legged flies which frightened by the approach of a human being gather their ungainly hind legs together behind and their fore legs in front of them and slowly and laboriously flutter upward into the sunlight they are well named these creatures the crane flies for their legs are as long and apparently much more useless than those of the crane in fact some entomologists have expressed themselves as wondering why they have such legs at all for they are so fragile that they break at the slightest touch They belong to a family with a thousand species in it, and perhaps the most peculiar thing about them is that some forms of the family live and fly about when there is snow on the ground.

This is a very rare exception in the insect world.

her strong spiny legs her powerful body filled with strong wing muscles and her sharp beak make this robber fly one of the most dreaded enemies of the other winged insects for like the hawk among the birds she pounces on them in their flight and tears them to pieces with her beak sucking the blood from them as she carries them in the air A single one of these insect hawks, or robber flies as they are called, has been known to catch and devour as many as eight moths in twenty minutes.

Yeah.

In, in late 2024, as I mentioned in the intro, you won the prestigious Evelyn Chapman Art Award for your plein air painting, Dance of March Flies.

C- can you take us inside the making of that painting? I mean, what was happening on the ground that day to bring that work to life?

So I had undertaken a residency, um, on the Morning Peninsula, and, um, I spent, it must have been a month there with...

So I would every morning put him in the carrier.

We'd walk every morning and afternoon.

We'd do these great walks, and I'd, um, do lots of drawings, and that experience, uh, fed into a full body of work of which Dance of March Flies was, um, one of those paintings.

And there was just, I mean, amazing life around me on that trip.