R and I had a crazily busy day today. After breakfast we began by setting up and loading an Aura frame that’s going to be given as a gift to a family member – a task which is remarkably unintuitive, even though we have one of these frames ourselves and have been using it very happily for a couple of years now.
Once we’d finally beaten the Aura software into submission, and after fuelling up on coffee and biscuits, we set about tidying the front lawn, where the ox-eye daisies are going over and setting seed. Not that I mind them seeding – if anything I want even more wild flowers in the front garden next spring than we’ve had this year – but the dead ones were doing nothing by now for the pollinating insects, and were looking very shabby. The quickest thing, obviously, would have been to mow the whole space, but neither of us wanted to get rid of the daisies that are still doing their job, and there are other wild plants – poppies, cornflowers, thistles, and a single, lonely but lovely, pyramidal orchid, that we also want to keep. So I used the little Stihl hand grass trimmer to define the flower drifts that we needed to leave, and then R followed me around with the mower and cut between those patches. It took a long time, and was quite hard work, but once we’d finished it looked pretty good. And as R said, no-one looking over the wall now (which lots of people do, as they stroll around the village) would be likely to suspect that the front lawn is full of “weeds” because we simply can’t be bothered to cut it.
By the time we’d had another coffee break (iced coffee this time, because the weather was pretty steamy by this point, and so were we) I was dismayed to realise that it was after 3pm and I hadn’t yet taken any photos. So I grabbed the camera and went off to the large pond belonging to some of our neighbours, in hopes of finding a dragon. Dragons were there none, sadly, but I did find and photograph a Southern Hawker exuvia, which was my first Southern Hawker sighting of the season.
Still without anything on camera other than record shots, and by now quite tired, I trudged round to the old village pond, where this Emperor was swooping metronomically back and forth, and all the other odonates had taken themselves off out of harm’s way. I’d grabbed a few blurry shots for the county records, and was itching to get away and look for better photos somewhere else, but the way the dragon kept flying up to this iris clump and slowing right down before veering away again suggested to me that he was tiring, and might possibly be about to perch. So I waited. And waited, and waited. And checked my phone repeatedly for the time. And finally, just as I was lecturing myself about the sunk cost fallacy and deciding that I really must go right now… he landed.
Two minutes and fifty assorted views later, I thanked the Emperor politely and left. “Anything?” said R when I walked back into the kitchen. “Emperor,” I said smugly. “Perched. And blue, obviously.” I love it when a plan comes together, especially when it happens quite by chance. Because I hadn’t had to go searching for other subjects I then decided that I had time to cut the wild garden, so I got the tractor mower out and did that; then I thrashed through some processing, made dinner, and finished the day with two loads of laundry and some more computer stuff. It’s possible that I’ll be spending tomorrow lying in a crumpled heap, but even if I do, I’m happy that all today’s achievements are safely in the bag.
R: L2, C10, D26.
