This afternoon I decided to take another trip up to the River Severn at Uckinghall, hoping to find more Common Clubtails. According to posts I’ve been seeing on social media over the past couple of days, at least sixteen fresh specimens were found along this stretch of the river on Thursday, which suggests to me that their usual emergence schedule was set back by the recent cold snap, and that they’re now taking advantage of the warm spell to get themselves out of the water as quickly as possible. This is a scarce species in the Shire, and eighteen individuals (plus the few that I and other people found earlier in the month) would be a great count for this site in any year, so I expected that the flood would have dried up by now, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if I’d found none at all today. In the event there was a single newly-emerged male, though I freely confess that I walked straight past his nettle perch without spotting him – but luckily I then bumped into a nice man who walked me back and showed me exactly where he was.
By the time I’d walked to the end of the fishery I’d photographed my first Black-tailed Skimmer of the year, and when I moved down from the bank to make a quick circuit of North Lake I managed to photograph two patrolling Emperors, which were also what birders term NFY. Frustratingly though, I failed to get my lens on another blue and green hawker that crossed a little inlet right in front of my feet, and which I’m ninety-something per cent sure was a Lesser Emperor. This species is the subject of much interest and debate in Worcestershire – there’s been evidence of it breeding at Ripple Pits for several years now, but it’s not widespread, and doesn’t seem to have more than a tenuous toehold in the county, so any sighting tends to cause a bit of a stir. Mine was quite credible, because a mature male was photographed at South Lake yesterday, but without evidence I don’t see that I can reasonably claim the record. I promptly posted my sighting in the local Odonutters’ WhatsApp group, hoping that a few other people would rush down to the site and help me search, but though it raised a small flurry of interest, my post failed to tempt anyone else to give up a relaxing afternoon in the garden in favour of squelching round a swampy lake edge in brilliant sunshine and 29° heat.
By the time I’d completed my circuit I had very much had enough, but dogged stupidity determination kept me going long enough to check the dragonfly pool and the fishing lake. There was nothing of interest at either, so I set off back to the car, by now hungry and thirsty, and very, very sticky. Suddenly though, all that was forgotten, when a large, pale dragon flew past me, made a few half-hearted approaches to the hedgerow bordering the path, and then suddenly dropped low and disappeared into it. By now I fear I was probably making a faint keening noise, but luckily there were no witnesses around who could confirm this.
I knew more or less where the dragon had gone, but he’d found a perch that camouflaged him so perfectly that I only found him, and identified him as a teneral male Emperor, after lengthy scanning with the binoculars. As soon as I lowered the bins and took a few steps forward he became invisible again, so I had to start over – and so it went on: scanning and stepping, and scanning and stepping – until finally I was close enough to pick him out by eye alone. Then all I had to do was repeat the process. but using the camera instead of the binoculars, to secure a series of increasingly close images. Eventually I ended up kneeling in the dirt just a couple of metres away from him, but by this time I’d realised that he didn’t care about me in the slightest, because he’d managed at some point during or after emergence to get some kind of yellow sticky substance on his left eye, and he was very engaged with the process of trying to clean it off. Dragonfly vision is unimaginable to humans (or at least, it is to me), and I have no idea what effect this patch of goo might have on his ability to see normally. But he clearly wanted the stuff gone, so it must have been bothering him, and I can only hope that in time his grooming efforts were successful.
R: L2, C10, D3.
