The storm worked its way through overnight, and by this morning the weather was calm, though it wasn’t especially warm and the light was dreary. Still, I was anxious that Amy might have seen off the Migrant Hawkers – usually, though not always, some of them hang on into the second week of October, but they’re on borrowed time now, and any day when I photograph them might turn out to later to have been the last of the season. So when R and I took our ‘coffee walk’ in Stratford, we headed straight for Lucy’s Mill Bridge and peered down into the reeds.
R spotted one first, and I managed to get a record shot, but we couldn’t see any others, so after a few minutes we crossed the bridge and carried on into town. But after my coffee I couldn’t resist yomping back down to the Mill in the hope that things might have improved, and happily they had: by now there were at least four males patrolling the reed beds. Then one of them managed to catch an incoming female and make off with her, while the others swirled around in what looked like agitation at having missed a mating opportunity.
I was still hanging over the bridge, waiting for photos to present themselves, when a couple stopped to ask me what I was doing, and then began to question me about dragonfly life cycles – clearly not realising that this is a subject on which I can bore for England talk at great length. I managed to keep the information concise though, stressing a few of the most remarkable facts about my favourite insects, and was rewarded when the wife said, “Wow! They’re amazing, aren’t they?!”, and her husband said, “Thank you – that’s very interesting. I fish, so I see a lot of dragonflies, and I always think they’re really charismatic, but I never knew much about them before.” By this time their daughter was agitating to move on, so we said goodbye and they left, but a few minutes later, just as I was also preparing to go, another voice said “It’s the dragonfly lady! Hello!”, and I found myself answering more questions and explaining the whole water/air life cycle again.
As I walked back up Mill Lane to rendezvous with R, I thought of some of the misleading book jacket quotes and theatre door posters I’ve seen over the years, and wondered about putting “Charismatic…. dragonfly lady!” on my web site. I won’t actually do it, you understand, but the idea of it made me smile.
