Basking

Waking me up on the first brilliantly sunny morning we've seen for weeks, R said, "You might want to reconsider your commitment to that meeting." This was an all-day on-line meeting of the British Dragonfly Society, which I'd booked to attend via Zoom, and while my commitment to dragonflies is, of course, absolute, I was more than prepared to forego listening to presentations about them, in favour of getting out into the garden with the macro. In the event though, I got to do both, because this turned out to be the only sunny part of the day: the light disappeared with an almost audible whoosh very shortly after the start of the meeting, and by lunchtime the wind had got up and we were back in October once again.

The front of the house faces east, and quite a few invertebrates were taking advantage of this sunny aspect and warming themselves up on the front wall. Among them were two Zebra Spiders, which were the first of their kind I've seen this year. The second one, which was bigger than this, had worked out that our dark green metal house name sign was even warmer than the wall, and I spent a while chasing it around between the raised lettering, but the resultant photos were a little odd. This specimen was more cooperative, except for the fact that it kept a resolutely low profile, rather than rearing up to get a better look at me as these tiny spiders will often do. This made the task of capturing its front headlamp eyes quite difficult, and in the end I had to lean against the wall and try to shoot straight along it, while trying not to scrape either camera or lens hood on the rough stone and mortar. In the process I nearly put my elbow on a Tapered Drone Fly that had chosen to warm up in exactly the wrong place, but I noticed her in time, and no hoverflies were harmed during the taking of this photo.

This was the programme for today's BDS meeting. The sections I found most interesting were Steve Jones' talk on the Red River Valley in Cornwall, Steve Cham's presentation on personal Odonata projects (centring on some of his own), and Steve Preddy's report on the Odonata Atlas for Monmouthshire, which he's currently compiling from volunteer records. All the presentations will be posted to YouTube next week, if you'd like to hear any of them.