First of the year

Oh my days - finally! 

Of course, I knew that the Odonata season would start here sooner of later, but my socials have been filling for three weeks or so now with images of damsels (various), Chasers (various), Banded and Beautiful Demoiselles and Hairy Dragonflies, from pretty much all other corners of the country, so that every day of fruitless local searching has increased my frustration and self-doubt. But it turns out that the Nodonata (©) problem hasn't been mine alone. The other day the County Recorder set up a new group activity on iRecord to chart all the local Odonata records submitted during the year, and I went straight on there to see what kind of luck other people I know were having - at which point there were just fifteen verified records, spread across the entire county.

The British Dragonfly Society likes to encourage engagement by declaring particular places as Dragonfly Hotspots; I'm thinking of writing to them about designating Worcestershire an Odonata Blackspot.

Anyway. Now we're past the rant, we can get to the actually interesting point: this is a virtually mature Large Red Damselfly. So, where did she come from - not from either of my ponds, I'm confident in saying - and where has she been since her emergence, which must have been at least a few days ago? It's not as if I haven't been looking (sigh), and it's not as if I don't know what I'm looking for. I've always said that this village is a particularly good environment for Odonata, because as well as a few ponds, a stream, and a nearby river, it has a large number of mature trees. But now I'm starting to wonder if actually the trees might be part of the problem: Odonata naturally gravitate towards them on emergence, and hang around there, feeding up and sharpening their flying skills, while they mature, but so many big trees in such a small valley mean that they've effectively got their own tiny woodland here, and they only need to come down to human height when they've started to contemplate finding some water in order to breed. Beastly trees.

As you'd expect, I was delighted to kick off my Odonata season (FINALLY!!), but I was sad that the Boy Wonder, who was here for the day with his mother and uncle, didn't get a proper look at this damsel. He wasn't with me when I spotted her on the laurel hedge, but I scuttled back to the house to fetch him, returning to the secret garden a couple of minutes later with R (a big damselfly fan) bringing up the rear of the expedition. The damsel was still in place, but too high for the Boy to see properly, and the placing of a hop-up step in front of the hedge proved to be one provocation too many for her to tolerate. "She'll be back," I asserted as we watched her disappear into a hazel tree - and she probably will - but it didn't happen today.