It was great to meet up with Hillyblips today, at Coombe Hill Nature Reserve in Gloucestershire, where she’s recently been photographing a Southern Migrant Hawker. This is a dragon that used to be vanishingly rare in this country, rarely making it much further than a tiny stronghold it was maintaining down in Kent, but in the last twenty years it’s been spreading, tortuously slowly, northwards and westwards. One or two pioneering males even reached the Shire last summer, but they were on a private site and I’m too old for law-breaking, so I didn’t get to see them. So this was a lifer for me, and I was very excited at the thought of seeing one just forty minutes from home.
Hilly told me afterwards that she’d feared the dragon wouldn’t show, but in the event we spent almost three hours watching his comings and goings from a small pool he’s holding as his territory, right by a tree-shaded bridge over the canal. Better still, there was another photographer on the bridge who knows the Coombe Hill site really well, and he told us that there are at least three Southern Migrant Hawkers present right now – two males and a female, and that the other day he caught a shot of the female and one of the males flying in cop. He’s hoping to find evidence of successful breeding at the site, but hasn’t managed it yet – though he said he saw the pair drop down into the reeds at one point, which is suggestive, because according to the Brooks & Cham Field Guide, this is a species that oviposits in tandem. I suspect we’ll all be haunting this little pool next summer, so see if we can spot some freshly emerged specimens.
Because we were standing next to each other for most of the afternoon I have almost identical photos to Hilly’s, though she controlled the quite horrible light and the movement blur much better than I did in the flight shot. So just to prove I wasn’t simply copying someone else’s work I’ve gone with a different view of the perched dragon, and a flight shot taken from the other side of the canal, where I was further away from the action but the light was behind me, so I could at least see what I was doing.
It was really good to catch up with Hilly properly after what must be nearly eighteen months, although we’ve chatted on social media from time to time in the interim. It was also good to meet Nick Hughes, a very nice man and generous with his time and knowledge, even if he is far too good a photographer for my liking. Or maybe he just has a very good camera…
R: L2, C10, D55.
