Lukewarm

This morning I went up to Cleeve Prior to check what was happening at the Community Orchard, and then went looking for the site of the old Cleeve Mill. Back when we lived in Cleeve this stretch of the Avon bank was almost inaccessible - in fact the only time I ever went near it was the day after the flood of 1996, when R and I walked gingerly down the crumbling lane until we could look down at the burst and frothing river. (I photographed an RAF search and rescue helicopter checking the static caravan park on the opposite bank for anyone still stranded there, and the guy in the camera shop in Stratford commented sourly when he handed over my photos that out of the many hundreds of flood photos he'd had to develop, I'd managed to produce a few that were at least vaguely interesting.)

Anyway, since then the lane has been repaired, the bank has been cleaned up, and some fishing pegs have been installed. It being a Saturday, these were all in use, mostly by the kind of grumpy old... people who very definitely don't go fishing in order to be spoken to by women. One chap was cheerful and pleasant though, and confirmed that there were dragons (and a kingfisher) working the area - and right on cue, a Scarce Chaser whizzed past (though the kingfisher was less obliging). The thick nettle beds around the pegs were absolutely teeming with damselflies - there must have been a couple of hundred Banded Demoiselles alone, in an area you can easily walk in less than ten minutes - and among them were this pair of White-legged Damselflies. He was very keen on her, but she was distinctly lukewarm about the whole copulation thing, and though he managed a couple of times to swing her up into the mating wheel position, she wouldn't fully engage. When I left them to what felt like a doomed relationship they were hanging in tandem from a nettle, he reluctant to let her go, and she waiting with what I felt was a rather long-suffering demeanour for him to give the affair up as a bad job. Which I daresay he would have done eventually: some large male dragonflies aren't above forcing a sexual encounter on an unwilling female (Southern and Common Hawkers can be especially vicious), but damselflies aren't really equipped for it.

Back at home I spent the afternoon rescuing the wildlife pond, which didn't get netted last winter because the warm autumn had aquatic insects flying late into the year, and didn't get cleaned and cleared this spring because the very wet weather made the ground too waterlogged for me to work on. (And also, if I'm honest, because I was out all the hours, photographing owls.) So it was clogged with rotting leaves, and overgrown with sedge and iris, and following the recent dry spell, the water was very low. Happily, my worry that there was probably nothing left alive in there were confounded - firstly by a large frog, which took exception to me pulling out some of the sedge and flumped across the surface in a grump, and then by a newt, which exploded out of a thick clump of dead leaves I was rinsing off in an ancient soil sieve I'd found in the shed, wriggled through the mesh, and hurled itself back into the water. An hour after finishing what was a fairly back-breaking project I wandered back down to the wild garden to admire my handiwork, and found several Helophilus pendulus hoverflies competing for the newly restored territory - so at least I managed to make a few creatures happy today.

R: C2, D17.