White legs

After being stuck at home for nearly forty eight hours I was raging to be out and about, but the weather outside my study window wasn't enticing, and neither of my weather apps was optimistic. By this point in the summer though, I'm starting to feel that I can almost see the end of the season appearing over the horizon, so by lunchtime the desire not to waste a potential invertebrate day overcame the disinclination to get rained on, and off I went.

Tiddesley Wood has never been a favourite place of mine, but I know a number of people who do like it, and it's one of the closest nature reserves to home, so I decided to give it another try. The rides and ride margins are mostly too wide, in my opinion, so you can't keep a close eye on all the low vegetation that might be supporting interesting inverts unless you zig-zag back and forth like a hunting dog quartering a field, and that gets quite tedious quite quickly. Nonetheless, and despite it being a mostly gloomy afternoon, I had a reasonably good time - and though I was tired by the time I got back to the car, I was able to get a restorative coffee just down the road, at Croome.

Tiddesley Wood is famous as a stronghold of the Noble Chafer beetle, but I didn't spot any of those today. Not did I see any of the Purple Emperors which have taken up residence over the past couple of seasons, though I spoke to a chap who said he had. But I did see my first White Admirals and Silver-washed Fritillaries of the year, and better yet my first Brown Hawker, so it was far from a wasted trip. I've put a selection of quite nice butterflies on my Facebook page, if you'd care to take a look, but this White-legged Damselfly is my favourite subject of the day by some margin.

I love this species because it's so distinctive and odd, with its hammer head, pale, thickened legs, and flamboyantly stripy thorax. The BDS says that it can be confused with other blue and black species of damselfly, but my answer to that would be, "Really though...??" I don't consider myself to be an expert odonatologist, but I can honestly say I've never mistaken one of these guys for anything else, even when they're teneral. This one is a mature male, and if you compare him to the immature specimen I posted as an extra about a month ago, you'll see the development of the blue colouration. These blue markings will carry on deepening as he ages. The pale markings of the females are a less attractive colour - cream, with a greenish or olive tinge - but luckily their mates choose them for showing up, rather than for their beauty.