Azure

After a busy morning with the Boy Wonder - breakfast, Stratford ("We in Shtratford now," he said, as we turned into Chestnut Walk, because He. Is. A. Genius.), playground, puddles, duck feeding, café for babyccino and cookie, screaming toddler head-fit on the way back to the car because he wanted to walk rather than be carried, home, lunch, bee-watching, tricycle-riding, Cheltenham, hand-over to Mummy.... R and I returned home in a state of near collapse. When R kindly offered to make lunch, I looked at him as though he'd lost his mind, and conveyed the concept of being too weak to chew clearly enough that he decided to ply me with Aperol instead, and waited until it had taken effect before risking another mention of food.

I was tottering around the garden, taking photos of various invertebrates that were as poor as you'd probably expect, when I spotted this female Azure Damselfly, and managed to up my game enough to get a couple of reasonable shots of her. This was my first Azure sighting of the year, and happened on the same date as last year - though this year it's only my second Odonata species, and in 2022 it was my fourth. I still can't find any sign of emergences from either of our ponds, but there's quite a lot of damage to the marginal vegetation in the patio pond, which makes me suspect that the sparrows may have been picking off larvae as they climbed the stems.