Help meeeee!

It's cool and grey today, with some drizzle.  Looking for an easy blip I came across a common darter that had been unfortunate enough to try to take shelter under the hydrangea.  Sadly for the dragonfly, the hydrangea is prime territory for the local spiders and it had become caught in one of their webs.

It was still alive and struggling at this point, but clearly unable to get itself free, and from the look of it wiping tears away from its eye(!).  So as soon as I had taken its portrait I carefully tried to free it from the web without doing it any more harm, and then transported it back to the irises by the pond so that it could try to recover from its ordeal.

I realise that for the TT challenge I should have taken a picture of the dragon on my finger at this point, but I was keen not to run the risk of further damaging it for the sake of a photo.

 I'm not sure if it is going to survive as the wings on its right side still had some of the web strands on them and it may not be capable of flight.   I'd offer to provide some more help, but once it was safely ensconced on the iris, it quite sensibly scuttled around the leaf so as to be as far away from the giant human as possible.

Nature is red in tooth and claw and I don't generally intervene.  But the dragon was still very much alive when I found it in the web and looked as though it might be capable of survival if it could just be rescued.  Still there is no doubt that on the other hand we now have one spider in the garden that is royally pissed off.  But I can live with that.

In other news the head cold does seem to be just a head cold - the covid test proving negative at the moment, which is good news.