Walking yesterday, observing flies, someone stopped to ask me what I was photographing. Maybe I’m just a little more coy than others, but for me, rightly or wrongly, I tend to be careful in how I respond. Even though I was observing Tachinids and other flies more broadly, I told this person I was actually observing hover flies. Because,
- The general term flies and the perception of flies is exceptionally negative.
- The term hover-flies is likely the only fly family they will have heard of without a negative connotation.
- There are no common names for the flies I was actually observing and very few common names for species of flies in general.
To my mind, shared cultural experiences of common names and our language around life-forms totally enforces, reinforces and manipulates our perception of them. As a child in the countryside, I could name many plants, most birds, most trees in my vicinity and had a connected awareness. I could name some fly families perhaps…but certainly no genera or species.
If we can only speak of flies on flowers as generic “hover flies” without even realising there are hundreds of different species of hover fly to see… don’t you think this impacts our awareness of biodiversity?