Fri 2012-08-17 
Flowers of wild parsnip (Pastinaca sativa).
The plants, which were swarming with hoverflies and bees, look like this:
And the leaves look like this:
Photos taken in Chazey Wood, near Caversham, UK, on 2012-08-12.
Thu 2012-08-16 Following my upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS, my greatest annoyance with the Unity interface has been the way it broke my web browsing experience. When using Firefox I make much use of Control-Right-Click to open multiple bookmark menu items. In Unity, this simply just does not work. The cause of this appears to be changes made to Firefox to integrate it with the Unity global menu. Fortunately, these changes can be removed quite easily. In the Firefox menus click:
Tools > Add-ons > Global Menu Bar integration > Disable > Restart now
Now the Firefox menus will respond correctly to Control-Right-Clicks.
Disabling Global Menu Bar integration also means that the Firefox menus stay at the top of the Firefox window instead of going up to the global menu bar. This will please my wife who found Firefox under Unity very confusing: "Where have all the menus gone? Where's my back button? Where's the address box? What have you done to my Firefox? It no longer works. I want the old one back". I suspect that these reactions will be fairly typical of the majority of Ubuntu users.
Thu 2012-08-16 
A female Palloptera modesta = Toxoneura modesta (Diptera: Pallopteridae). Distinguished from the similar Palloptera umbellatarum by the lack of a spot on the anal vein (near the trailing edge of each wing about one quarter of the way from the base to the tip). This individual seemed to be laying eggs on the flower heads of spear thistles (Cirsium vulgare)
Photos taken in Whiteknights Park, Reading, UK, 2012-08-14.
Wed 2012-08-15 
A tiny black Tachinid fly: probably a male Phasia pusilla (Diptera: Tachinidae). Phasia barbifrons is another possibility.
Photos taken in Whiteknights Park, Reading, UK, on 2012-05-16.
Tue 2012-08-14 
A female Anthomyiid fly, either Estalomyia festiva or Eustalomyia hilaris (Diptera: Anthomyiidae). Superficially similar to the much commoner Anthomyia procellaris, but the pattern on the thorax is actually quite distinctive:
This individual was continually on the move, walking over the upper and lower surfaces of logs, as if searching for something. It occasionally jumped from one log to another and only flew when I accidentally disturbed it.
Photos taken in the field below Chazey Wood, near Caversham, UK, on 2012-08-12.
