Small Skipper

Yesterday I took a walk around Tilly's field, the hay meadow that's about a hundred metres from our house, and found not only Small and Essex Skippers, but scores - maybe hundreds - of grasshoppers and crickets, in different stages of maturity. I also saw my current nemesis, a Wool Carder bee, on this scrubby patch of black horehound, but wasn't fast enough to get focus on it, so this morning I went back for another try.

It was windy, which isn't ideal in an area that's thickly covered in long grass, and most of the time it was overcast, so there were fewer insects around than yesterday, and none of them was a Wool Carder. (Sigh.) But I got a few nice images of other things, and this female Small Skipper resting on the black horehound is my favourite shot of the morning. It's sometimes harder to differentiate female Small and Essex Skippers than it is the males, which have differently shaped sex brands, but you can see a faint orange mark on the end of her nearer antenna in this photo, whereas in Essex Skippers the ends of the antennae are completely black.

This afternoon I went over to Croome for a blustery walk around the lake. The usual damselfly suspects for this stage of the season were all present, with Blue-tails being by far the most numerous. Dragon-wise, there were about twenty mature male Ruddy Darters patrolling the reed beds, but I saw no females, and nor - very surprisingly - did I spot a single Common Darter of either sex. There was one male Southern Hawker hunting over the lake, and a single, elderly and rather forlorn-looking male Black-tailed Skimmer resting (as they do) on one of the gravel paths, but I didn't see either Brown Hawkers or Emperors. Hairy Dragonflies and Chasers were also conspicuously absent, and I'm afraid that that their season at Croome may now have ended.