Breeding residents

Mad dogs, and Englishwomen with an Odonata obsession, and the tolerant husbands of said Englishwomen who suspect that they need someone to lug their photographic gear, go out in the midday sun.

R and I managed to catch up on a lot of sleep last night - largely by leaving open every upstairs window that didn't represent a positive invitation to burglars - and by this morning we both felt substantially restored. Nonetheless, my joints were giving me problems, and knowing that I had a yen to go dragon hunting at Croome, R very sweetly offered to postpone all the stuff he'd been intending to do himself, so he could drive me and carry my cameras.

Some of you may remember that I fell out with Croome a few weeks ago, when I discovered that the lake was being "restored" to the state envisaged by Capability Brown, to the clear detriment of the local wildlife. I hadn't been there since that visit, though in the interim I have had an email correspondence with the estate manager, which I certainly didn't enjoy and I doubt she did either, given that my last message to her remains unanswered. However... someone I know went to Croome a few days ago, and photographed a good range of Odonata species, so I thought it was worth risking another trip.

After two circuits of the lake and quite careful observation of the remaining bankside vegetation, I would say that numbers of dragonflies and damselflies are well down on what I'd expect at this point in the season. This isn't really surprising, given the ongoing vandalism along the watercourse (though to be completely fair the extreme heat may also be partly to blame, because it's a mixed blessing for invertebrates, which lack any internal mechanism for controlling their body temperature). But on the plus side, we did see Brown Hawkers, Black-tailed Skimmers, Common and Ruddy Darters, and Blue-tailed, Small Red-eyed and White-legged Damselflies - the last being a particular surprise, because I don't remember recording one at Croome before. The big absentee was the Migrant Hawker, which I'd expected to see because they've been out in other places for a while now, but of which I couldn't manage to find a single individual.

Small Red-eyed Damselflies seem to appreciate our rising temperatures more than I do. The species was first recorded in the UK as a migrant from Continental Europe, in Essex, in 1999, and it was first proved to have bred in this country in 2002. Over the past twenty years it's become well established as a breeding resident, and has spread across England at a rate the British Dragonfly Society describes as "spectacular", extending as far as Devon and North Yorkshire. In theory its flight season overlaps substantially with that of the Red-eyed Damselfly, but in practice it tends to emerge as the Red-eye is declining. Nevertheless you have to be careful because they are very similar, but there are a couple of features which establish this pair as Small Red-eyes: the black dot in the centre of the male's blue thoracic panel is a suggestive but unreliable marker, but the fact that his S8 abdominal segment is more than half blue is diagnostic, as is the fact that the female's shoulder stripes are complete. In the Red-eyed Damselfly the male's S8 is largely black, with just a little blue on the ventral surface, and the female has very short antehumeral stripes.