Dragonfest

My 2025 dragon list still doesn't include the Common Clubtail, so this morning I went off looking for some. By the end of the day I'd seen over a hundred dragonflies (including two species that were new for the year), but none of them was a Common Clubtail. If I don't find some soon I'll likely have missed them altogether, because once they're mature they tend to hang out in the tree canopy rather than at photographer height - but that's a problem for another day, and doesn't remove any of the shine from today's dragonfest.

I started out at Severn Stoke, just along the river Severn from the best known Worcestershire Clubtail site at Ripple. Severn Stoke has the advantage that you can sometimes find a Clubtail without actually leaving the car park, but Ripple, though harder work, is the more reliable site. Today, sadly, neither the car park nor the river bank at Severn Stoke was Clubtail-productive, and the damselfly count wasn't especially impressive either.

Croome Park is only a few minutes drive away from Severn Stoke, and though it isn't a Clubtail site it is coffee-and-cake-productive, so I made it my next port of call. While relaxing with coffee and a brownie, I realised that my reluctance to wade though the bankside vegetation at Ripple, and climb up and down the tall fishing pegs, was growing stronger by the minute; and with the last bite of brownie I made a sudden decision not to do Ripple today, but to walk the perimeter of the ornamental watercourse at Croome instead.

Within seconds of reaching the 'river' I was confronted by my first Scarce Chaser of the day - hovering over the reed bed and staring at me - and I realised that the dragon gods were smiling on my decision. It took me the best part of half an hour to cover the next three hundred metres of bank, because there were so many dragons and damsels to identify, count, and photograph, and the whole perimeter walk - which isn't even 10,000 steps - took nearly three hours.

The river produced Scarce Chasers, Four-spotted Chasers, Emperors, Black-tailed Skimmers, a couple of Hairy Dragonflies, and a single ovipositing Broad-bodied Chaser. There were also Banded Demoiselles, dozens of Azure and Red-eyed Damselflies, some Blue-tailed Damselflies, and even a White-legged Damselfly, which is a species I don't remember seeing before at Croome. Of the dragons the Scarce Chasers were by far the most numerous, and almost everywhere I looked I seemed to find pairs of them in cop. This photo was taken down at the carriage splash, where there were three pairs copulating in the same clump of reeds; one of the other pairs would be visible in the bokeh to the left of this couple, if I hadn't opted to crop the image square.

All along the river I was charmed by the noise of Reed Warblers chuntering in the bankside vegetation, and I even caught sight of a couple, though i didn't manage to get them on camera. I had better luck with a Great Egret, which took off from the river and flew towards the lake, only to return with a Grey Heron in hot pursuit and land in a cedar tree. The Heron then gave up the chase, and the Egret settled in the tree as if that had been its preferred destination all along.

The lake, when I eventually reached it, was less productive than the river, but it was noticeably better populated than I've seen it at any point over the past few seasons. And in all honesty, I'd already taken so many photos by this point, that I was quite relieved not to have to push my shutter count very much further.