We walked westwards today, skirting the north side of the town and reaching the River Orwell. This lake is trapped against the Orwell estuary by a narrow dam and is home to....
....a good selection of damselflies.
Damselflies are difficult to identify on the wing as they're so small so there's plenty of homework to be done on our return in the hope that the photos I've managed to take help to identify them. Some, like this one, a male red-eyed damselfly, are pretty obvious but his....
....mate lacks the red eyes and looks very similar to several other female damselflies.
At least with the damselflies they tend to stay fairly still as one approaches them so it's much easier to take a good picture than it is with the dragonflies, many of which are almost constantly on the move.
This one is a male blue-tailed damselfly, which isn't terribly helpful as a name since several other species also have blue tails - like the red-eyed damselfly.
Some just don't lend themselves to a definite identification. This pretty little damselfly may be a white-legged damselfly. If it is, it's an immature female and illustrates one of the problems of damselfly identification: they can change considerably as they mature. Add to this that there is considerable variation in colour within a species, and it's unsurprising that just sorting out these four took almost an hour.
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