After Work at Westbere

With a bit of warm sunshine after work this week, I have made a couple of visits to Westbere Lakes where I have wandered around seeing what dragonflies are on the wing. There have been hundreds of Variable and Blue tailed Damselflies with good numbers of Azure Damselfly along with lesser numbers of Red eyed Damselfly and c30 Banded Demoiselle along the river. One of Westbere's iconic dragonflies, the Scarce Chaser has started to appear and c6 have been seen walking around the lakes. Hopefully their numbers will begin to increase in the next few days. One of my favourite dragonflies, the Hairy Dragonfly of which I have seen c4 on recent visits continues to be seen mostly flying low up and down the dykes but tonight whilst searching, I was lucky to find a mating pair in the 'wheel' position. I managed to get into a good position and although getting stung by stinging nettles was not fun, it was nice to capture a few pleasing shots. Weather permitting, i'm off to Goring tomorrow near Oxford with Adrian Dowling in the search of a new dragonfly species for the both of us, the Common Club tail Dragonfly. With some help from Paul Ritchie who knows the site well, we hope to maybe see some emerging and you never know, maybe a photo opportunity will come our way if we are lucky!

'Mating' Hairy Dragonflies