Miracles of the Night!

Having successfully reared a number of Hairy Dragonfly nymphs during the past few years through to adults, I have been able to collect some important data with regards to the times that they are most likely to emerge. From my observations, I would say that at least 90% of reared nymphs have emerged between 9pm - midnight during mild quite still nights. I have only had a few that have emerged during the early morning (5 - 8am) and even fewer after 9am. Of course, this is only information that I have produced and others will no doubt have different data but personally, this has helped me to often be in the right place at the right time. It has also been noted that they will try to emerge within 3 days of the nymphs starting to stick their head and back of the thorax out of the water. Having photographed a number of Hairy Dragonfly nymphs emerging during the past few years using a flash and a diffuser, it often gives a daylight effect to the photos so I had in mind that I wanted to photograph an emergence of this species but showing the stillness and darkness of the emergence during the quiet time of the night. With one more Hairy Dragonfly nymph due to emerge from my garden pond, I have kept checking the past few nights when a couple of days ago, I could see the nymph well above the water line. The weather was mild and still and around 9:30pm, the nymph started the climb higher up the stem in preparation to emerge. I had all the equipment ready and only moved in slowly when the nymph had become motionless. With my stem in a pot, I was then able to gently slide the pot along the pond shelf until I had a complete dark background which I wanted for my night time photos. After the usual waiting around, I could slowly see the thorax starting to swell up and this was my signal to start capturing the emergence. In the next 90 minutes, I spent an amazing time on my own in the darkness capturing what has to be one of the most magical sights in the natural world. On most of my previous sessions, the newly emerged dragonfly always clings to the exuviae to expand its wings but with the wind slowly getting up, the Hairy Dragonfly moved around the other side to shelter which for me, was brilliant and gave me some of my best emergence shots of this species to date. With the emergence successful and just before midnight, I decided to call it a night and retired indoors for some well earned sleep. To complete the story, I was up early the next morning before work where I collected the dragonfly from the pond and drove over to Nethergong and released her near the pond where I had collected the nymph from. Hopefully out at the weekend to have a look around although it looks like the weather may have other ideas!

 

Hairy Dragonfly (Brachytron pratense) female emerging