A Dragonfly Year

It's a year since I began to take a serious interest in recording the dragonflies in this part of Suffolk, spurred on by an increasing realisation that this was a truly fascinating group and well-represented in the small ponds and fleets of this part of the world. I had taken pictures of them before, and made half-hearted and often inaccurate attempts to identify them - this four-spotted chaser is a species which occurs both in western Scotland and in Canada.

As time has worn on so we're finding species which we first saw a year ago, and which are starting to reappear. This species, the common darter, lived up to its name last summer and autumn and is back again in good numbers. I'm getting better at knowing both how to identify them at a distance and at attracting them within camera range. This young male was tempted to settle in our garden by a strategically-placed bamboo cane.

With the temperature at 28C I spent over an hour this afternoon standing on the footbridge over the King's Fleet, one of the best places for dragonfly-spotting. A first sighting of another species from last year was....

....of this pair of ruddy darters joined in a wheel.

A little patience usually produces a picture of a dragonfly but some of the males of the larger species pose a technical problem which I haven't solved: they're so anxious to find a mate that they don't land, so any picture has to be of them on-the-move. So, if you can find him in the picture, this is a male brown hawker. I have a good picture of a female but I have yet to find a male prepared to perch for a portrait.

There were three or four male emperor dragonflies patrolling up and down the fleet but only one stopped to catch his breath, and then he only perched for a moment. He's had a tough time: look at his left hind wing.

Some hawkers are much more willing to perch and allow one to approach. On my way home, having failed to catch a good picture of any of the larger dragonflies along the fleet, I saw this male common hawker clinging to a hedgerow along a roadside, hardly bothered by the passing traffic.