A quick trip to the Community Orchard at Cleeve Prior this afternoon gave me my first Emerald Damselflies of the season. I only found these two across the entire site, but the fact that they were ovipositing made it a particularly good sighting. Emerald Damselflies used to be a common species in the Shire, but over the past few years their numbers have shrunk quite markedly across the county and they’ve been lost altogether from some sites, so the fact that they’re continuing to breed at Cleeve Prior is very good news.
I’ll try not to big this up too much – I wasn’t digging coal here, or solving some abstruse mathematical problem – but it wasn’t all that easy to get this shot, given that I was standing on a narrow, brambly bank a couple of metres above a deep pool into which I was quite keen not to fall, and the damsels and their chosen leaves – which were roughly on a level with my waist – were blowing back and forth in a stiff breeze. When you add in the fact that the ideal image here would have all elements of both participants in focus, I’m going to excuse the ninety four frames it cost me to achieve four ‘keepers’, and the fact that even this one, which is definitely the best of the bunch, isn’t absolutely sharp.
After whisking around the orchard and recording all the odonate activity I could see, I drove on through the village and down to the old mill site, where I found that I literally couldn’t move more than ten steps without putting up a Scarce Chaser. I’m pretty sure that after I went looking for Stubbs Pool ten days ago, I said that I’d never seen as many Scarce Chasers in one small area as I did that afternoon – but today eclipsed that record by some way. The area I was checking this afternoon is roughly a hundred metres by twenty – which by coincidence is about the same size as my garden – and contained upwards of twenty Scarce Chasers, either pursuing each other around the site or looking for prominent places to perch. I even have a photo of two of them sharing a single nettle stem, which is pretty unusual behaviour among mature dragons. All but one of the individuals I caught on camera were male, and all of them had previously mated, but because the urge to breed is their paramount driver during this last brief phase of their lives, all were keen to find another female and get her into cop as soon as they could.
All of which makes my second photo this evening either amusing or poignant – I can’t quite decide which is my stronger reaction – because it shows an elderly female resting on some bramble at one end of the wharf area, quietly minding her own business while the boys swirled back and forth overhead. The fact that she’s developing that chalky blue pruinescence along her abdomen shows that she’s reached the stage young men Odonatologists like to call “over-mature”, but she’s still unmistakably female, and the fact that she’s come down to the river again suggests that she has mature eggs which need to be fertilised so she can lay them. So she’s able and willing to breed… but from her demeanour, perhaps not wholeheartedly keen. Having taken her photo I decided to leave her in peace, so I didn’t see the next stage in her story, but if she got tired of waiting for one of the males to spot her during a flypast, she’d only have needed to get up and fly slowly round the clearing a couple of times to have started a minor riot.
R: L2, C10, D38.
