Goodness knows, I didn’t want to go out today. Or actually, do anything other than lie under a fan in a darkened room. But when I staggered round the garden there was nothing to photograph: all the flowers bar some yarrow and a few thistles are either dead or dying, and all the insects, including butterflies, had taken themselves off into shade. So I got the car out and went to the nearest place I could think of, which was Cleeve Prior Community Orchard.
I was pleased to see the floating vegetation in the ponds suddenly covered with pairs of Small Red-eyed Damselflies – a new species for the season – and I also caught some passable record shots of a Brown Hawker, but I didn’t find the Willow Emerald Damselfly I’d been hoping for. To be fair, it’s a bit early for Willow Emeralds here – it was the back end of August last year before they began to turn up in East Worcestershire – but they have been seen in other parts of the county, and the season is playing through so fast in this insane weather that every time I go out now I travel in expectation of coming across one.
But as they say, if you can’t be with the one you love you should love the one you’re with, and I’ll admit to being quite fond of this mature male Ruddy Darter, who posed very nicely in pleasantly flat light on the bank between two of the ponds, and obligingly kept returning to the same twig after every hunting sortie. I politely tipped my (actual) hat to him in thanks before I left, because good manners cost nothing.
R: L2, C10; D49.
