Bluebottle Flies on Chicken Manure
When Sam cleaned out her chicken coop last spring, I took the manure up to dump into a pile near our garden. Then, on May 28, 2023, I noticed that the entire pile was covered with hundreds, if not thousands, of flies.
Moving in a little closer, they all appear to be the same species – metallic blue, and maybe 50% bigger than a typical housefly.
Here are a few somewhat closer pictures:
I didn’t get in any closer than that, because the smell of rotting chicken manure is beyond appalling, and I’m not that dedicated.
These are all pretty clearly blow flies in the genus Calliphora, which are commonly called Bluebottle Flies. On the one hand, most of the flies in this genus look about like this, and given the quality of the pictures it isn’t really practical to say which one is which. But on the other hand, the most common species is apparently Calliphora vomitoria, and there isn’t anything about these pictures that would lead me to say that they aren’t this species, so we can stick with this. The species name vomitoria is pretty descriptive of the sorts of things that their larvae eat: decaying corpses, rotting garbage, wet manure . . . you know, all the things that have a smell that make you want to vomit.
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