After a poor start. the Community Orchard at Cleeve Prior is now working hard to make up ground: today, as well as most of the species I found there on Thursday (minus the Scarce Chaser, who probably saw me coming and took himself off to the safety of the trees to avoid my boots), there were two or three Four-spotted Chasers staging reenactments of World War One aerial dogfights over the Orchard Pond, and this fabulous male Broad-bodied Chaser perched up at the Big Pond. He’s still pretty fresh, and was understandably nervous about being approached, but one of the nice things about these Chasers is that they like to survey their chosen territory from a comfortable seat, and once they’ve chosen one or two good twigs they tend to stay faithful to them, so even when he did lift off and take a turn around the pond I had a pretty good idea of where he was going to land again. Would that all dragons were this predictable!
Although that chunky outline might lead you to think that this is a big dragon, he really isn’t: the average length for this species is around four and a half centimetres, with a wing span of about three and a half. By contrast, a Southern Hawker would tend to come in about 7cm in length, with a 4.5cm wingspan, and there are several other hawker species that are bigger still. Broad-bodied Chasers are common and widespread, though I never seem to see more than one or two at any site, and they’re often attracted to garden ponds. Interestingly, given that this pond was almost completely stripped of a luxuriant covering of bogbean during the winter, the Smallshire & Swash guide states: “This species benefits from the creation of new ponds and quickly re-colonizes neglected ponds and ditches after dredging.” One of the delights of chasing dragons is their apparent contempt for some of the ecological and behavioural traits assigned to them by experts, but on this occasion the memo seems to have been received and acted upon.
R: L2, C10, D2.
