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I must apologise to people who are actually capable of identifying flies that my next few may be distressing. Much as I tend to assume a plain-coloured dragonfly to be a female red-veined dropwing, I often assume that any bristly or slightly peculiar fly is a Tachinid.

This is not an intentional slight, it is just one of the character flaws I hope to iron out when, in the foreseeable future, someone points out what family each fly I have so grossly misidentified actually belongs to. With the vast number of flies I have taken pictures of and promptly misidentified, this experience should improve my judgement by a sizeable fraction.

In the meantime, this fly, "Call it a Tachinid part 1 of 5", was found:

Date: 18/08/2011
Place: Chongwe District, Lusaka Province, Zambia.

The actual site was at the side of a swimming pool, in an ornamental garden amongst low-intensity farmland.

EDIT - Size of fly, I'd estimate an unremarkable 6-8mm (it wasn't bigger than a medium-sized housefly).

EDIT pt 2 - Although you can't see it in this image, it had faintly smoky wings. If necessary, I can upload an image of the wings.

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Yes, it looks like a tachinid, but it would be very hard to go further from a photo :)

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I suspected it might be a dead end. Thanks.

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Just realised that I was sitting on a potentially helpful image of this individual's rear end;

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And wing. Do those help narrow it down at all, or is it still just Tachinidae?

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So the underbelly and wing were unhelpful. Incidentally, what part of a (live) tachinid is most informative in acheiving a decent ID?

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In this case I think the specimen would be necessary because it is from the Afrotropical region, which is short on literature and even shorter on experts who are familiar with the fauna. The same goes for most regions outside Europe actually. To have a chance of keying from the photos you must have shots of the wings and body (dorsally) ... head laterally and dorso-laterally ... legs laterally (to show bristling) ... and any other angle you can get, just in case ;)

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Thanks, the next [UK] fly I see is having as many angles photographed as it will tolerate! And here I was thinking if I could get wing shots I'd be in the clear...

Will.

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Doodling through the gallery at 10 to midnight (as you do) and when I stumbled upon the Rhinophorid Stevenia it struck me that this bore a fairly striking resemblance... is this possibly a Rhinophorid?