I’d be the first to say (because it’s always best to be the first in this kind of situation) that I’m not the most patient of women. And that’s on a good day, which today was not. To be fair, after a reasonable night’s sleep I felt appreciably better than I did yesterday, but given that yesterday I left my brain behind every time I turned my head, and had to spend most of the day horizontal, that wasn’t a big achievement. Anyway, today I was upright (more or less) and moving (slowly) and I felt up to having a bit of a rummage around the garden in search of inverts – but I was definitely not in the mood for being messed around by the pesky creatures. So every time one of them got a bit antsy and tried to avoid being caught on camera, I’d give it the benefit of some pithy character analysis, and stomp onwards in search of someone more cooperative.
This went on until I reached the bottom of the wild garden, wandered over to inspect the nettle bed that lines the fence, and discovered this stunning damselfly lurking there. The briefest glance at those wings identified him as a Beautiful Demoiselle, but the double-take I did a split second later said “immature” – both his wings and his eyes being too brown for him to be a mature specimen. As he ages both will darken, until his eyes look almost black, and his wings are deep brown with iridescent blue veins. Distant record shot achieved, I was edging towards him while pondering the question of why a freshly emerged Beautiful Demoiselle has appeared in the garden in the last week of June, when it’s a late spring and early summer species… when he took off and landed in a small elder tree. Then almost immediately lifted off again, probably because I looked at him a bit funny, and repositioned himself half way up a forty-foot cypress. Temper creaking, I gave him a particularly filthy look and started to turn away, when he was unexpectedly bounced off the cypress by an aggressive Red Admiral, and fluttered back down to the nettles.
At which point we began a game of… what? Not Grandmother’s Footsteps, because in that game you have to creep up behind the designated Grandmother, and as any fule kno, you can’t creep up behind an odonate because they have wrap-around eyes. On the other hand, their brains are wired to react to movement, so if you move very slowly and smoothly, keeping the camera held up in shooting position, and manage to avoid tripping/sneezing/suddenly turning to look at a large dragon* that just flew past, you can often get reasonably close to them. I’m calling it Odonata T’ai Chi, and I’d like to recommend twenty minutes of it as both an effective physical workout and an excellent tool for achieving spiritual/emotional balance. By the time I got this shot – the last of a sequence of about eighty – and thought, That’ll do, Pig – that’ll do… I was calm, relaxed, and at peace with myself and the world, and the Demoiselle was so used to me gliding around him that he was relaxed too, and no longer afraid that I might be a predator. If I could learn to apply this level of patience to the rest of my existence, I might finally achieve some personal growth.
• A humongous female Southern Hawker – my first of the year.
R: L2, C10, D37.
