The Community Orchard at Cleeve Prior has been a bit of a disappointment this season, Odonata-wise. Up till today all I’d managed to record there were a couple of Azure Damselflies and a single Banded Demoiselle, plus, just yesterday, three Large Red Damselflies. Today though, the season kicked off with what in my head was a satisfyingly audible Woomph.
In the course of forty very hot minutes this afternoon I recorded a male Hairy Dragonfly (who perched for a brief rest, very obligingly, just when I feared I was never going to get a decent shot of his fast and furious patrolling), multiple Azure and Large Red Damselflies, several White-legged and Common Blue Damselflies, this gorgeous Scarce Chaser (there may have been two, but this one was pretty antsy after I found him by almost stepping on him, and was whizzing about too much for me to make a definite count), and – an unexpected bonus as I wandered happily back towards the car – the equally fabulous Beautiful Demoiselle in today’s second photo. I’m also pretty sure – though not quite confident enough to test the County Recorder’s patience by listing him without a photo – that I saw a male Four-spotted Chaser. While none of these are new on my year list, the Hairy and Scarce Chaser (and indeed, the putative Four-spot) are new on my county list, which has been disappointingly short so far this season. Things are looking up!
Until half an hour ago there was no doubt in my mind that the Beautiful Demoiselle – known to his many fans simply as ‘virgo’, because Odonutters like a nickname nearly as much as birders do – was going to head this post. But then R and I bumped into each other by the kettle, and he told me how much he’d liked yesterday’s Scarce Chaser, to which I replied that I preferred the one I got today – “even though it was shot through grass and stuff.” This relates back to a conversation I had with H on Tuesday, while I was offloading all my old 7DII gear onto him, about someone he knows who loves to photograph birds, even if he has to shoot through a lot of intervening foliage to capture them. H said, carefully, that he suspected that kind of thing wasn’t really my bag, and I happily agreed, saying that I will do it if I have to, but I think of myself as a documentary rather than an artistic photographer, so I’m generally striving for a clean portrait.
Anyway, I came back to my Mac and looked at these two photos again – the clean and clear Demoiselle and the Chaser amid all its messy context… and I started to change my mind. And then I asked R what he thought, and he agreed with my new thinking. So here we are, with me embracing the shot-through image at the age of never mind how old, and the clean portrait it took me fifty frames to achieve relegated to also-ran. On another day I’ll probably revert to my obsessive pixel-peeping pursuit of perfection (see what I did there?), but for today I’m hanging loose.
R: L2, C9, D21.
