Really - is the plonk a fly? The author of the book, entomologist and writer Vitaly Tanasiychuk, solved this problem for "his own" flies, which he studied, and spoke about them - and much more. About one of the now forgotten islands of Gulag, about expeditions, about his beloved Zoological Institute and its people, and at the same time about mammoths and animals carved in stone. As for the methodology for studying clattering in flies, it turned out that it was set forth in the minted formula of Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky, familiar to everyone from childhood.