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Authors: Fredrik Sjoberg
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the Middle Ages there were people in our country who were happy enough and rich enough to import narcissus bulbs from distant southern lands. Narcissus poeticus, the Easter lily, and other bulbous plants in beautiful and ugly colours began then to bloom in garden beds and parks across wide areas of the country, but oddly enough it was only in the 1910s that the narcissus fly arrived. The man who first spotted it, outside Helsingborg, was a still unknown elementary schoolteacher named Oscar Ringdahl. He told the world about his find with a short notice in Entomologisk Tidskrift . The year was 1911. He was twenty-six years old. The rest is history, at least for entomologists.
Oscar Ringdahl became a great man, something of a legend. They called him Fly Ringdahl.
As a youth he began collecting beetles and butterflies and did it with such energy that on one occasion, in pursuit of an attractive beetle, he crawled right under a bench where a pair of lovers sat kissing. But he quickly decided that flies were more fun than other insects, possibly because so little was written about them. He had only a book from 1866 about the people and natural history of Finland in which there was anything about flies. Then he read a work in Latin by Zetterstedt. With these two antiquated books in his baggage, he set out on a hunt for flies that lasted his entire life.
As a brief biography, that’s not half bad. The quotation is taken from a 1944 issue of the weekly magazine Idun and is as good a testament as any to his fame. The article also mentions his wife, Anna, an obviously understanding woman. “ ‘Oscar gets so excited every spring when the flies start buzzing. It makes him forget all the aches and pains of winter,’ says Mrs. Ringdahl, and her husband laughs.” By that time (he had a long life) his collection already contained 60,000 flies.
The larvae of the narcissus fly live in the bulb itself, underground, and they probably established themselves in Sweden by stealing a ride in bulbs being sent from Holland. No one knows for sure, of course, but my guess is that’s how it happened. One clue is that the famous fly expert George Henry Verrall writes in his 1901 book about the hoverflies of the British Isles how, on 8 June 1869, he caught the very first English specimens of this fly in his brother’s garden on Denmark Hill in south London, which received annual shipments of Dutch narcissus bulbs.
The narcissus fly is now common both in England and here in Sweden, even though the various species of the genus Merodon are native to the warmer climate of the Mediterranean. Or were. Now they’re native here too. This fly may have come as an immigrant from the south a long time ago, but now it has the same residency rights as any other fly. This is my basic political position. Not a very risky one, I have to admit, but that’s only because fly politics have never really caught on. Why, I don’t know. Spanish snails, mink, wild boar, cormorants, what have you—they all attract a steady stream of populist xenophobes and loudmouths of every kind, but no one cares about flies. Not even the paranoids keep me company. But it is political. And in fly questions I am a liberal and do not insist on a closely regulated transition period before they can be incorporated into our fauna. Let them come. We’ve got plenty of room.
The question of alien species is quite complex and sensitive. I don’t intend to go into it deeply. But I would like to note that the hoverfly-hunter can hardly be anything but tolerant in the matter of alien species because he spends his time in the border country, literally, between culture and nature, in a microworld governed by constant coincidence and incessant disturbance. Everything is changing, all the time. I am drawn to gardens—and to meadows, the few that are left. For me, they are wilder and richer and much more fun than nature undisturbed by human beings. And so are pastures, avenues, churchyards,
Oscar Ringdahl became a great man, something of a legend. They called him Fly Ringdahl.
As a youth he began collecting beetles and butterflies and did it with such energy that on one occasion, in pursuit of an attractive beetle, he crawled right under a bench where a pair of lovers sat kissing. But he quickly decided that flies were more fun than other insects, possibly because so little was written about them. He had only a book from 1866 about the people and natural history of Finland in which there was anything about flies. Then he read a work in Latin by Zetterstedt. With these two antiquated books in his baggage, he set out on a hunt for flies that lasted his entire life.
As a brief biography, that’s not half bad. The quotation is taken from a 1944 issue of the weekly magazine Idun and is as good a testament as any to his fame. The article also mentions his wife, Anna, an obviously understanding woman. “ ‘Oscar gets so excited every spring when the flies start buzzing. It makes him forget all the aches and pains of winter,’ says Mrs. Ringdahl, and her husband laughs.” By that time (he had a long life) his collection already contained 60,000 flies.
The larvae of the narcissus fly live in the bulb itself, underground, and they probably established themselves in Sweden by stealing a ride in bulbs being sent from Holland. No one knows for sure, of course, but my guess is that’s how it happened. One clue is that the famous fly expert George Henry Verrall writes in his 1901 book about the hoverflies of the British Isles how, on 8 June 1869, he caught the very first English specimens of this fly in his brother’s garden on Denmark Hill in south London, which received annual shipments of Dutch narcissus bulbs.
The narcissus fly is now common both in England and here in Sweden, even though the various species of the genus Merodon are native to the warmer climate of the Mediterranean. Or were. Now they’re native here too. This fly may have come as an immigrant from the south a long time ago, but now it has the same residency rights as any other fly. This is my basic political position. Not a very risky one, I have to admit, but that’s only because fly politics have never really caught on. Why, I don’t know. Spanish snails, mink, wild boar, cormorants, what have you—they all attract a steady stream of populist xenophobes and loudmouths of every kind, but no one cares about flies. Not even the paranoids keep me company. But it is political. And in fly questions I am a liberal and do not insist on a closely regulated transition period before they can be incorporated into our fauna. Let them come. We’ve got plenty of room.
The question of alien species is quite complex and sensitive. I don’t intend to go into it deeply. But I would like to note that the hoverfly-hunter can hardly be anything but tolerant in the matter of alien species because he spends his time in the border country, literally, between culture and nature, in a microworld governed by constant coincidence and incessant disturbance. Everything is changing, all the time. I am drawn to gardens—and to meadows, the few that are left. For me, they are wilder and richer and much more fun than nature undisturbed by human beings. And so are pastures, avenues, churchyards,
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