A beginners guide to the 180 species of Irish hoverflies is now available to freely download. It is a comprehensive guide, 100 pages in length and 5MB in size. It is NOT a scientific key. It is simply intended as a guide to help make hoverflies more accessible to beginners. It refers only to genera/species currently known from Ireland. Efforts have been made to keep technical terminology to a minimum.
The guide should be used sequentially and you will need to spend a little bit of time familiarising yourself with how it works.
If you’re interested in learning to identify hoverflies, it will hopefully be a useful resource and help bridge the gap between starting and moving to the use of scientific keys. If you have suggested improvements or find any errors in the guide please email: ufitzpatrick@biodiversityireland.ie
You can download the guide here, or from the ID guides page of the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan website
