I’m beginning to lose count now, but just based on the number of exuviae I’ve collected, this is at least the tenth successful Southern Hawker emergence this season from our little wildlife pond. That said, for a while I thought that it might be going to end badly.
I was excited when I first saw her, just a couple of minutes before I took this photo, because she was so freshly eclosed – note her wings, which are still very ruched from compression inside the larval wing buds – that I thought it likely she’d still be in place when the Boy Wonder arrived at lunchtime, and I was looking forward to showing him a fresh dragon, and explaining how they transitioned from water to air. I even took some shaky hand-held film so that he could see her like this, before she enlarged herself and her cuticle hardened.
Over the next twenty minutes she expanded her wings fully by pumping haemolymph into them, and then began to inflate her abdomen in the same way. Happy that her wings were perfect I went back to the house to do some chores, but when I next checked on her, twenty minutes after that, there was a blob of haemolymph on the left forewing, and both left hand wings were slightly bent. My second photo shows the sight that made me fear they might not be functional. Obviously I don’t know what had happened, because I wasn’t there, but she was quite high on the pond sedge, and it was breezy, so the likeliest explanation is that her perch had blown around while her wings were still soft and vulnerable, and something had bent the left ones and pierced the forewing, causing a slight ‘bleed’ of haemolymph. This can be catastrophic if the clot sticks the wings together, but on close examination I didn’t think that that had happened in this case, and I decided that I could risk showing her to the Boy.
In the event I was proved right, I’m relieved to say. Both left wings hardened bent, and they’ll stay that way through the rest of her life, but mid way through the afternoon L, B and I watched her make a successful maiden flight from the pond to a nearby hazel sapling. The Boy wasn’t as impressed as his mother, I have to say, but he was still quite engaged by the spectacle. He also remembered what I’d told him about the exuvia being her old skeleton, and I was charmed that he referred to it as her bones.
My highlight of today’s visit was taking B for a walk around the village (“We’re going on an Adventure,” said the Boy, “and I am in charge.”), and the elaborate fantasies he spun while we walked. After dinner (which finished with three helpings of chocolate ice cream and a licked-out bowl) L and I took him out again, to try to work some of the sugar out of his system, and this time he insisted on taking a drawing of a lion that R had done for him on an earlier visit. “This is a map,” he said, handing it to me. “We are going to look for a lion.” Forty minutes later, tired and a bit emotional because L had said that it was time to go home, he said, “But we didn’t find a lion!” “No,” I said, “but we did find a cat, and a cat is like a lion.” He turned to check this with his mother, who agreed that a cat is really just a little lion, and then frowned at both of us as if he couldn’t decide whether we were simply taking the mickey, or completely losing the plot.
D: C4, D3.
