We walked for over three hours this morning along the footpaths to the west of our house, on a chilly day with a brisk wind, not expecting to see any dragonflies. How wrong we were! Just along the edge of this hedgerow we found....
....several Common Darters - this is a female - usually on little tussocks where they could soak up the sun.
At one point the footpath traverses some twenty metres of undergrowth and then skirts a small, algal-covered pool. This drainage pipe spans it, and it had attracted four male and one female Common Darter. They were in the sun, the metal was warm, and they were out of the wind - what more could a dragonfly ask? There was even a fly available for lunch but they couldn't be bothered.
To our surprise we spotted a mating pair of Willow Emerald Damselflies, a species which was rare in SE England a few years ago but which is busy colonising the country further and further north.
This is one of the Hawkers. We haven't seen any of them for a few weeks but today we saw this one near the algal pool and another about a quarter of a mile further on. The three species to be seen locally aren't easy to distinguish but I think this is a Southern Hawker and the later one a Migrant Hawker.
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