R had a couple of appointments in Stratford this morning, and I tagged along for the ride, going off to the river in search of dragons while he was otherwise engaged and then meeting up with him for coffee.
There were only two male Migrant Hawkers patrolling the reeds around Lucy’s Mill Bridge, and this was the more interesting of the pair – partly because I’d never seen him before, and partly because of what appears to be significant damage to his left eye, along with a less obvious defect on the left side of his 6th abdominal segment. It’s likely that these are emergence issues, and while they haven’t stopped him flying and feeding himself, one or both of them may explain the fact that when a female arrived he failed to get a good enough grasp on her to initiate copulation. Having shaken him off she flew directly upwards, way above my head, before zooming off along the river. He can’t have seen this though, because instead of chasing her, as would usually happen in these circumstances, he started an increasingly frantic search among the gaps in the half-collapsed reed bed, apparently convinced that she was hiding somewhere down there. Eventually he gave up and settled on this leaf, which is when I took my photo.
Worrying about the fate of a single insect is the fast route to madness, and I try not to indulge in it, but I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for this dragon. His time is coming towards its end, and with it his chance to pass his DNA to the next generation. For all I know, he may already have won the mating lottery – with some species of dragonfly you can tell from scratches on the abdomen whether or not the males have mated, but that’s not the case with mosaic-patterned species like this – but today’s showing makes me think that he’s working at something of a disadvantage.
