It's been a very poor year so far for dragonflies at Frog End. Although lots of damselflies emerged several weeks ago we haven't seen one for over a month and this female southern hawker is the only dragonfly we've had so far this year
I wonder if the harsh winter killed off a lot of larvae. Certainly the drought earlier in the year would have done - we were very sad to find that one of our favourite nature reserves for odonata - the Old Sludge Beds in Exeter had dried up almost completely by early summer.
I was very pleased that the hawker chose to land on the native flowers in our garden (this one's hemp agrimony) - whilst I do have hundreds and hundreds of southern hawker photos most show them perched on trees or bushes rather than flowers.
4 comments:
Helen,
The odes will recover. A few years ago the local park drained both it's big ponds and after filling them back up, it was bad in the way of odes. Now a few years later the ponds are hopping. Our pond is swarming with odes right now. Many are chasing my bees around my hive.
Nice shots.........just so long as it's a good year for a wedding.
Thanks Adrian - the weather's beautiful here in Devon right now. Fingers crossed it holds for a couple of weeks.
Randy it's great to hear about your local park - fingers crossed that our local populations recover as easily.
The populations at Thurstaston also remain fairly static depsite some of the main poold drying up every hot summer. I wonder how|/
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