Over the winter the King's Fleet which, last year, produced some good sightings of dragon- and damselflies, was cleared of reeds and dredged. Then, as the winter progressed, a thick brown scum formed on its surface. All this suggested that, as a dragonfly habitat, it had had a bad winter.
So it was very heartening this afternoon to spend almost an hour on the footbridge which crosses the fleet and see no less than three species of dragonfly, all of them females.
The first is a first sighting for me of its species, a Norfolk hawker which, despite its name, is also establishing itself in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and down into Kent.
The complications of identifying dragonflies is illustrated by the next two. Having seen a couple of male emperor dragonflies it's good now to have found some females, but they vary in colour, from this one which has blue on her abdomen to....
....this one which has green. Not that it matters too much - what does is that they were actively ovipositing.
Lastly, this is another new one for me, a brown hawker female.
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