On The Wing

I'm pretty sure that the main shot is a male Emperor Dragonfly on the wing.  The light wasn't ideal and it was quite windy.  I had gone back down to the water meadows in the hope of spotting some damselflies on the wing, but the wind sort of made that a non-starter.  Fortunately there was an abundance of chasers and several larger dragons.  At the time I thought that I might be looking at a Southern Migrant Hawker male, but now that I can see all the details I'm reasonably confident that this is an Emperor.  Its easy to confuse the Emperor with other Hawkers, but I think this one is the real deal - our bulkiest dragon.  There's an extra of it from side on for comparison purposes.

I did also have a go at damselflies on our pond, and I've uploaded a shot of some reds in flight which somehow reminds me of those WWI aeroplanes and dogfights.  In this case its all reds, but as you can see the solitary male red would dearly like to interrupt the conjoined pair of reds if it could.