It was almost exactly this time last year when I went to Woorgreens Nature Reserve in Gloucestershire, and found the lake teeming with damsels and dragons. Today my count there was 3 Emperors, one Brown Hawker, one Keeled Skimmer (elderly), two Black-tailed Skimmers, and about half a dozen Ruddy Darters, plus a few blue damselflies that were too far out on the floating vegetation for me to identify them. Maybe it was simply too hot, I thought. It was definitely too hot for me.
Given that I was already grumpy and frustrated I might easily have cut my losses and gone somewhere else at this point, but I remembered that when I was chatting to Nick Hughes at Coombe Hill the other day he told me that the best dragons at Woorgreens are often to be found at the ponds surrounding the lake. I was already sure that the ones on the heath would be dry (I checked later, and they were), but I thought it was possible that one or two of the ones in the woodland close to the lake might still have water. So on the principal that I hadn’t actually driven all that way for a few shots of a battered old Keeled Skimmer, I gritted my teeth, wiped the sweat out of my eyes, batted away the small army of biting flies that were following me like a gang of miniature would-be assassins, and went to have a look.
Almost all the ponds and runnels were completely dry and barren, but there was just one that was still supporting thick emergent vegetation – suggesting that even though I couldn’t see any, it must still have some water. And there I found my dragons: several Ruddy Darters, and two blue mosaic hawkers, which were mostly managing to avoid each other by patrolling opposite sides of the pond. I couldn’t reach the far side, or even get properly close on the side closest to the path, but luckily for me the hawker on this side was not only calm, but actually quite interested in this new arrival in his territory, and spent quite a while hovering where he could take a good look at me, and I could get equally good views of him.
I’m not going to pretend that I knew immediately what I had here. It was dark, and my eyesight isn’t what it was, and my initial identification was Migrant Hawker. It was the right size and colour, after all, and more importantly it was behaving like a Migrant Hawker, which are beloved among those of us who like to photograph dragonflies in flight, for their habit of hovering in one spot for several seconds at a time. A nearly-dry pond seemed a strange place to find a couple of Migrant Hawkers, though, given that I hadn’t seen any at the lake, which would seem to be a more natural habitat for them.
At this point a loud klaxon should really have sounded in my head – who’ve I encountered recently who likes shallow, brackish water that dries out completely in hot weather? – but it was only when I pulled up the photos and saw those gorgeous yellow and blue side panels, and the big orange wing spots, that I realised I was looking at a Southern Migrant Hawker. This is a young male – as he ages the blue colour will deepen in his eyes and the mosaic spots on his abdomen, and will spread forward along his thorax – but he’s fully mature and ready to breed, and I sincerely hope that his steady patrolling of this little pond will turn up a female, so he can pass those gorgeous looks on to a new generation. Because Woorgreens is off my normal beat I have no way of knowing if the Southern Migrant Hawker has been seen here before, in which case the two I saw today might actually be Gloucestershire bred and born, or if they’re part of this summer’s influx into the UK from Europe. It will be interesting to see what response I have from the County Recorder when I submit the sighting.
R: L2, C10, D57.
