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Hi Tim, yes some good points. I guess the ease of bird ID may have improved as better optics became more available and now digiscoping is coming in for providing evidence of rare sightings. A parallel with the advent of high quality, affordable digital macro photography of insects maybe. And yes, some experts may be dismissive of amateur records and methods, but at the point where the latter clearly begin to achieve results and become useful to science (supplementing, not replacing the work of specialists) realistic experts should surely embrace this new source of information (as clearly happens a lot on this site!).

As for the need for beginners' / non experts' guides to knowing what family/ genus one is looking at, that would really help. I rely on distant memories of sketchy student entomological courses and some very basic books, and go a lot on the "jizz" as i do for birds, but there are many families of small flies that stump me completely still, as I never met them before and the basic books have maybe one poor drawing of a not very representative species! An online guide / key to identifying insects to family / genus level and advice on what keys to go to for further detail would really help a lot of non specialists. Maybe there is one, but I've not come across it yet.

As for tachinids, I know Tachina fera well and it makes for great shots, and I did recently get a really small one identified - to Ramonda spathulata - probably... - through this site and will be looking out for more tachinids this year. Chris tells me to look out for the jazzy green Gymnocheta viridis when the sun next shines. Thanks for the tip on affordable, useful keys.

Nick