R and I spent the day trying to recover from the surfeit of fun we had with the Boy Wonder over the weekend. My urge to get out and about wasn’t strengthened by the weather, which was horrible for the first few hours of the day, but eventually it cleared enough for me to feel that my excuse for staying in had evaporated, and maybe after all I shouldn’t spend the entire day horizontal, reading a novel and eating chocolate. So I donned waterproof trousers and wellingtons, and went over to Cleeve Prior.
The Community Orchard was quiet, Odonata-wise: apart from a couple of score of White-legged Damselflies, there were only a few Azures and Common Blues noodling about in the long grass – plus two Emperors, a single Four-spotted Chaser and a female Scarce Chaser at the ponds, none of which photographed well (or at all in the case of the Scarce Chaser, who took to the trees the instant I got within record shot range). The White-legged Damsels are coming into their mature breeding colours now though, and as I’ve always thought that the males especially are among the loveliest and most elegant of damselflies, I spent a little while trying to get the cleanest and best-focused shots of them I could manage.
Cleeve Prior Mill was equally quiet on the odonate front, though the huge bramble thicket at one side of the clearing was literally seething with bees, feasting on the nectar. There were a few butterflies among them, and I’ve added a second photo showing a fresh Comma, even though I confess that it makes me a little twitchy to see a scene as autumnal as this, when we haven’t yet reached Midsummer Day. I also took some rather gruesome photos of a perched female Scarce Chaser essentially unhinging her face, to allow passage of a mayfly she’d caught, which I’ll post to the main dragonfly groups on Facebook if you’re a member of either of those.
This evening, glued as usual to Springwatch, I was in equal parts enchanted and dismayed to see Iolo Williams broadcasting from a boat off Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire, with Gannets diving into the sea all around him. If you missed it, this section of the programme begins at 49m 40s. As I said to R, the RSPB must be thrilled with this fantastic (and presumably free) publicity, but given that I haven’t yet been to Bempton this year and was hoping to get up there within the next couple of weeks, I’d rather the BBC hadn’t made it look quite so enticing. There’s plenty of cliff there, of course, and more than enough birds to go around (half a million is the current RSPB estimate, I believe), but I’m never at my sunny best in the middle of crowd. And… breathe….
R: L2, C10, D18.
