Look Out, The 'Mixta's' Are About

The past few visits to Nethergong in the past week have seen the Migrant Hawker numbers slowly building up. I have found a few areas where during the day, quite a few can be seen perching up and with a bit of luck, some are within camera reach although the majority of them are quite high up in the trees. With a bit of patience and slow moving towards them, they are a species that you can get quite close to and are a great subject for the camera . I managed on a previous visit to find a few low perching individuals which enabled me to grab my first images of the year of this species but as is often the case, the background is quite busy so a challenge in the next few weeks will be to see if I can find some subjects with a more pleasing background to show off the subject better.

Migrant Hawker (female) 

Migrant Hawker (Immature male) 

Most of the Migrant Hawkers seen at the moment are immatures and I hope soon to find a few males on territory which might allow a few flight shots to be taken. These are about the easiest species to photograph in flight as often they can hover for good periods of time allowing the photographer to get on to them and rattle off a number of shots. A few sites I used to visit for these I cannot access now so it remains to be seen how successful I will be this season with the flight shot challenge. Another pleasing aspect I have witnessed this week is the amount of people that stop to ask me what I am photographing and after and explanation and me showing them a dragonfly up close, there is often a lot of interest there, always good to see others and especially youngsters interested in nature. Hopefully with some nice sunshine forecast for the next few days, I can get out to get more photographs of the dragonflies I encounter. I really would like to find and photograph a mature male Southern Hawker, surely one of the best looking dragonflies we have in this country.

Migrant Hawker (female)  

Migrant Hawker (Immature male)