At 9am it was 27°C in Stratford-upon-Avon. When I left, four hours later, it was 33°. In between times I did two hours of shopping – WHY??? I HATE SHOPPING – and then walked down to the river and melted into it, while trying to photograph dragons. After that, feeling slightly ill, I went and met R in an air-conditioned café, where we drank iced coffee. On the plus side, I emerged from Shopping Hell with two summer dresses, two cheap t-shirts and a pair of sandals that are dressy enough not to look as if I’ve been wearing them while crawling round a field. On the minus side, I haven’t been even slightly cool since 6.30 this morning, and the circumference of my ankles would make an elephant jealous.
Whine, whine, whine.
At Lucy’s Mill today there were at least two Emperors and a couple of Brown Hawkers patrolling, as well as all the usual early summer suspects. I surprised myself by managing to get a couple of focused flight shots of one of the Bown Hawkers, but sadly he was a long way from my vantage point on the bridge, and therefore very small in the frame. Decent record shots though – so yay! me. I then nearly fell in the river by standing on a piece of bank that wasn’t really there, while trying to photograph some Scarce Chasers in cop – only to realise when I looked at the images afterwards that both parties were so… sh mature that their wings were almost in shreds, and they were far from photogenic.
So instead I bring you this lone male, who’s obviously been quite successful in the mating stakes, given the heavily abraded patches on the sides of his abdomen, but has still managed to keep himself pretty dapper. His secret may be speed and manoeuvrability, rather than charm, because I first noticed him when he strayed into the flight path of a Brown Hawker and had to extricate himself very fast indeed from what might easily have been a terminal lapse of judgement. Brown Hawkers aren’t especially aggressive, but they’re big and fast and could easily take down a dragon of this size, and this one chased the much smaller Scarce Chaser around the reed bed by the bridge for several seconds before giving up and resuming his patrol. My hero soon went back to his own patrolling activity, but dropped down onto this perch every time the Brown Hawker came back, and kept a low profile till the coast cleared again.
R: L2, C10, D34.
