231 ISSN 0013-8738, Entomological Review, 2020, Vol. 100, No. 2, pp. 231–238. © Pleiades Publishing, Inc., 2020. Russian Text © The Author(s), 2020, published in Entomologicheskoe Obozrenie, 2020, Vol. 99, No. 1, pp. 127–136. Louse Flies (Diptera, Hippoboscidae) on the Courish Spit (Kaliningrad Province, Russia) E. P. Nartshuk a, *, A. V. Matyukhin b , A. P. Shapoval a , M. Yu. Markovets a , and O. O. Tolstenkov b a Zoological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, 199034 Russia b Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 119071 Russia *e-mail: chlorops@zin.ru Received May 22, 2019; revised January 20, 2020; accepted January 20, 2020 Abstract—Louse flies (Diptera, Hippoboscidae) were collected off 38 species of birds from 16 genera of 14 families and 5 orders. Birds were captured in large funnel traps and mist nets on the Courish Spit (Kaliningrad Province, Russia). Five species of ornithophilic louse flies were found: Ornithomya avicularia (Linnaeus, 1758), O. chloropus (Bergroth, 1901), O. fringillina (Curtis, 1856), O. comosa (Austen, 1930), and Crataerina hirundinis (Linnaeus, 1758); besides, the mammalophilic species Lipoptena fortisetosa (Maa, 1965) was recorded on a non-specific bird host. The association of louse flies with their hosts, infestation parameters, collection data, and general geographic distribution of the recorded louse fly species are considered. The overall infestation of birds with louse flies was low. The louse fly fauna of Kaliningrad Province is compared with the faunas of the adjacent territories. Keywords: ornithophilic louse flies, Ornithomya, Crataerina, distribution, numbers, birds, Courish Spit, Kaliningrad Province DOI: 10.1134/S0013873820020128 Studying the biology, ecology, and behavior of orni- thophilic louse flies requires examination of birds during spring arrival, reproduction, and the subsequent autumn and winter migrations. This is the only way of distin- guishing the louse flies native to the region from the in- troduced ones. Birds can carry louse flies from the win- tering places to the nesting grounds in spring, and in the opposite direction in autumn. Besides, ornithophilic louse flies are occasionally recorded on mammals and mammalophilic ones, on birds; this fact reflects various biocenotic contacts between different animal groups and increases the epidemiological and epizootological sig- nificance of Hippoboscidae. Louse flies harm birds by sucking their blood and also by transmitting bacterial, rickettsial, viral, and protozoan infections. Thus, these flies form an important link in the spreading of trans- missive diseases of animals and man. They can mechan- ically transfer pathogens from one bird to another, in particular from migrants to local species. Besides, some pathogens can develop in the bodies of louse flies (Baker, 1956, 1963, 1967; Pavlovsky and Tokarevich, 1966; Lvov and Ilichev, 1979; Balashov, 1982; Ganez et al., 2002; Farajollahi et al., 2005; Matyukhin et al., 2013; Zabashta et al., 2017a, 2017b). The largest review on the Palaearctic louse flies (Dos- zhanov, 2003) was mainly based on material from Ka- zakhstan, in particular that collected from birds migrat- ing over the Chokpak Pass (1200 m above sea level), at the junction of the north Talas Alatau slope and Boral- daytau in West Tien Shan. T.N. Doszhanov also used data from the scanty publications on some other regions of the former USSR. On the whole, the louse flies of Russia are still insufficiently and unevenly studied. There are only three publications on the louse flies of Kaliningrad Province, the westernmost region of Rus- sia, for which five species have been recorded (Popov, 1965; Doszhanov and Abelkariev, 1991; Nartshuk et al., 2019). The Courish Spit is visited twice a year by great numbers of migrating birds of different species, which