I went over to the Community Orchard at Cleeve Prior this afternoon, expecting to find plenty of damsels and dragons, but most of the ponds are now either virtually or completely dry, and all I found were a single very old Common Emerald Damselfly, a patrolling male Southern Hawker, and a perched male Ruddy Darter. So then I went down to the old mill site on the Avon, where there were just three Migrant Hawkers – none of whom allowed me anything other than a rear-end view – and a single male White-legged Damselfly.
By now I was starting to worry that the season might have crashed to an untimely ending, but I decided to try one more location, and hit lucky where the River Avon bounds the Heart of England Forest site at Barton. As I came off the footbridge I almost ran into a cruising Brown Hawker, and at the fourth fishing peg I visited there were several male Migrant Hawkers competing for possession of the reed bed – though all of them would hastily give way to the Brown Hawker, whenever his patrol brought him into their territory.
Brown Hawkers are ridiculously fast, even though they barely appear to be moving their wings, and in this afternoon’s poor light I knew it was a fool’s errand to try to capture such a dark and low-contrast subject, so I left him alone and concentrated on the Migrants. For quite a while they all stayed out over the river, but they were hovering very nicely so I didn’t mind too much that they were a bit distant, and I’d almost reached the point of thinking that I now had enough photos to work with, when I glanced down and discovered this one – just below me, and very close. He zoomed away when I turned the camera towards him, but then came back and hung motionless while I took a long burst of shots. The sun was just starting to emerge from the clouds at this point, and although it was only about 4pm there’s a nice suggestion of golden hour light on his wings.
As I walked across the car park I bumped into a couple walking their dog, and they asked if I’d been photographing the Kingfisher: it seems that there’s a juvenile around the site, and they said they’d seen it every day so far this week. I explained what I’d been doing, and the man said he thought dragonflies were probably even harder to photograph than Kingfishers, at which I laughed and said, “That’s the fun of the thing.” The comment felt a bit disingenuous, though, because as subjects Kingfishers have always been a bit of a nemesis for me, whereas if I’m honest this dragon presented himself to me gift-wrapped. If you narrow your eyes, it even looks as if he’s wearing a gold bow.
R: L2, C11, D13.
