Two blues

My best spot of the day today was a male Scarce Chaser, which swooped down over the Long Deep Pond at Cleeve Prior Community Orchard while I was checking it for damselflies. Sadly, he banked away and disappeared before I could even lift the camera, but a deep red dragonfly in the UK at this time of year can't be anything other than a Scarce Chaser, so I'm hopeful the record will be accepted. And even if it isn't, I've been able to add the twelfth species of the year to my own records, which represents an unprecedented start to the season.

Even though I failed to photograph the Scarce Chaser, there were plenty of other invertebrates at the Community Orchard, and my extra photo tonight shows one of them. I had to follow this male Common Blue butterfly for quite a way before he settled, and I might wish he'd chosen a less ratty buttercup for his resting place, but I can't really complain after finding a butterfly which in recent years has been anything but common in these parts, and so early in the season. The Common Blue can be double-brooded in southern and central England, and if this male is successful in attracting a mate, I may get to record some of his offspring here as well, during August and September.

On another day the Common Blue might well have made it to top spot, but today he was pipped at the post by this male Banded Demoiselle - not so much for having selected a nicer buttercup, as for having chosen a photogenic perch at all. Banded Demoiselles favour nettles, bramble, dock leaves, and tangles of reeds, and to catch one in an attractive setting like this is quite unusual. I photographed him in the fishermen's car park at Cleeve Prior Mill, where the demoiselle count has risen to around forty, and the Mayfly spinners are dancing in a thick cloud and mating frenetically, while more duns continue to emerge from the river. 

I was pottering very happily around the clearing, seeing who I could manage to sneak up on, when dark clouds suddenly appeared and thunder began to rumble, loudly and persistently, and sounding very close. I looked around me, at the Avon on one side and the heavily wooded cliff on the other, and decided that it might be sensible to get into my mobile Faraday cage and head for home before the storm arrived.