Drama

I risked a trip to Croome this afternoon, in search of dragons. Last year the lake was almost devoid of Odonata, a situation I blamed (vocally) on excessive clearance of the emergent vegetation on which so many species depend, and I fell dramatically out of love with a park that had been one of my happy places for a number of years. Today I'm happy to say that the situation was much better: I saw Hairy Dragonflies, Scarce, Broad-bodied and Four-spotted Chasers, and my first Black-tailed Skimmer of the year, as well as Banded Demoiselles and Azure, Large Red, Red-eyed, Blue-tailed and Common Blue Damselflies. This is pretty much what I'd expect for this site at this point in the season, give or take an Emperor or two, and with the reeds and rushes regrowing, things at the lake seem to be getting back to normal.

I've chosen this Black-tailed Skimmer for my main image because he's the first I've seen this season, and he brings my Odonata list for the year so far to a pleasing eighteen species. His perch here was the edge of a drainage channel that runs into the north end of the lake, and he was defending it robustly from a couple of male Broad-bodied Chasers that were patrolling this section of the bank and looking for perches of their own. Under normal circumstances they would perch on reeds, but as there are virtually none along this edge of the lake at the moment and the Skimmer wasn't sharing, they often ended up using grasses and plants up on the bank, which weren't ideal as vantage points. Because the Skimmer was facing into the sun he was throwing rather dramatic shadows, and I've cropped this image to include his long shadow wings.

I've included a second quite dramatic photo this evening, but if you suffer from ophidiphobia I'd suggest that you give it a wide berth. When I arrived the lake, almost the first thing I saw was a grass snake, swimming across the channel where the lake narrows into the river. Although grass snakes favour wetlands and are known to be strong swimmers, I've personally only ever seen this twice, and both times were at Croome. Grass snakes mainly prey on amphibians, and small mammals and birds, but they will also catch and eat fish.

The last drama of the day happened as R and I were enjoying a pre-dinner drink, when the noise of jet engines reminded me that the Red Arrows were performing at the Midlands Air Festival at Ragley Hall, a few miles down the road. Last year they flew right over our village, so I grabbed the camera in anticipation, and we went out onto the patio to see what we could see. For a while it seemed as though they weren't planning to fly in our direction, though we still had a surprisingly good view of some of their manoeuvres, but then suddenly they were roaring towards us, and when they flew literally over our heads I discovered that 500mm of lens was about twice as much as I actually needed. I've put a few images on my Facebook page, if you'd care to take a look.