This may well be the messiest image I’ve ever posted, but it’s one I was very pleased indeed to capture. It shows a pair of southern Migrant Hawkers taking off from the cleared reed channel at Croome, on what the soppy romantic in me* likes to think of as their nuptial flight. Some species of dragonfly are quite happy to stay where they are once they’ve formed the mating wheel – a little earlier I’d photographed a pair of Migrant Hawkers in cop in one of the reed beds – but Southern Migrant males seem to prefer to take their partners into the privacy of the surrounding trees.
I’d only found this male a couple of minutes earlier, after a good half hour of searching the channel, and I was still trying to get some credible record shots of him to send to the County Recorder when he spotted the incoming female, seized her with his claspers and some grass stems with his forelegs, and brought her into cop. He then swung her round through 90° and took off, continuing to turn until he was flying towards me, and rapidly disappeared with her past my left shoulder. There were just four seconds between the first frame in my burst of shots and this one, which is the last that’s anything like in focus. After the pair had left and my heart rate had dropped a little, I took a very bad phone photo of my camera screen and sent it to the Worcestershire Odonutters WhatsApp group, then found some shade and sat on the bank of the channel, expecting the Southern Migrants to come back to oviposit in this favoured spot. But after ninety minutes with no sign of them, common sense finally prevailed, and I called it a day and took myself off home.
“You’ve got your Wallace grin on,” said R as I strolled into the kitchen. “What did you get?” “A pair of Southern Migrants,” I replied smugly. “In cop.” If I’d realised at the time that one of the coupled flight shots was usable, I’d probably have treated him to the Crash Bandicoot dance as well.
* To be clear, I’m a bitter old cynic, and if there ever was a soppy romantic in me, it left the building long ago.
R: L2, C10, D81.
