Reward

This morning, because the weather had suddenly turned warm and sunny again, and the timelines of my socials are currently full of the early Odonata which seem to be bursting out absolutely everywhere but here, I went off on a damsel and dragon hunt. Result: Nodonata (©). None at any of the seven ponds in the Cleeve Prior Community Orchard, none along the Avon at Barton, and none at the feeder stream that comes down to the Avon through the Heart of England Forest.

I was stomping back to the car in a huff, when I was hailed by a guy who was sitting on a bench in the car park, eating a sandwich. Because he didn't have wings I wasn't absolutely sure that we'd never met, and knew for certain that I couldn't put a name to him, but I'm much better at recognising voices than faces, and as he chatted on I became confident that we didn't actually know each other, and relaxed. And in the end it turned out to be a valuable conversation, because he'd just finished walking around Dorothy's Wood, over the road from the car park, where he told me he'd seen dozens of butterflies: "Big red ones, white ones with orange tips on their wings, sort of tortoiseshelly ones, and green ones." "Green ones?" I said, antennae quivering. "Yes - bright green ones." "Tiny?" "No. Huge."

Huge green butterflies....? Obviously not Green Hairstreaks (dammit), but what could they be? Dark Green Fritillaries aren't a woodland species, and anyway, it's too early for them, and anyway, they don't actually look green. I was obviously going to have to go and look for myself. So I thanked him and did just that, and even though it turned out that he was talking about Brimstones (yellow, in my opinion), I was glad I had, because he was right that Dorothy's Wood has an excellent population of several different species of butterfly. I hadn't been there for a couple of years, and on my last visit it was such a quagmire that I struggled to keep my feet, and so empty of wildlife that I wrote it off as a useless location. But that was clearly a premature judgement. There were still Nodonata (©), but I did have the pleasure of watching the nuptial flight of a pair of Brimstones - grinning with delight as they spiralled vertically away above my head, and eventually disappeared from sight.

Because I'd already walked a long way, carrying probably too much gear, I was tired during my trudge around the wood,  and pretty incompetent with the camera. But once I got home R - an experienced diagnostician of biscuit deficiency - fuelled me back up with coffee and triple chocolate cookies, after which I made a much better fist of snapping some garden invertebrates. This Honeysuckle Sawfly (a female, I think) was taking a nap on one of the honeysuckles when I rudely disturbed her, on which she stood up, turned round rather laboriously, marched to the front edge of the leaf, tipped herself over, and went back to sleep underneath it. Grateful she'd chosen to take a route that gave me this excellent half-profile view, I whispered my thanks and tiptoed away.