Hubris: meet Nemesis

Feeling like the Great Odonata Hunter after the various successes of yesterday, I headed off down to Wiltshire this morning in search of a Lesser Emperor. Five hours and two and a half circuits of Lower Moor later, and after drinking enough coffee on the lakeside terrace of the Dragonfly Café to keep me awake for a week, I admitted defeat and headed home. 

"They're definitely here," said one of the servers at the café, as I was preparing to leave. "I saw one last Saturday. Perhaps you should stop looking for them, and concentrate on other things for a while. Then you'll probably just trip over one."

I immediately recognised this as Very Good Advice. And because I'm highly receptive to Very Good Advice (ahem), it turns out that I'd already pre-followed it, several hours earlier, without even meaning to: while processing my images this evening I found a photo of a Lesser Emperor, which I'd taken an hour into the visit while I thought I was photographing something else. It wasn't a great photo, because it was shot from the ventral side of the dragon, through a bramble patch, but it was good enough to seal the record. I confessed my embarrassment in the UK Dragonflies and Damselflies group on Facebook, to which I'd turned for confirmation of the dragon's identity, and commented, "Sometimes I think I'm getting worse at this malarkey, rather than better."

No more than five minutes later, and after banging my head on my desk a few times, I was back in the group acknowledging an even higher level of mortification, having just come upon an entire sequence of images of a second, fresh female Lesser Emperor. About two hours after seeing the first specimen, and several hundred metres deeper into the reserve, I accidentally put the pesky creature up out of thick, thigh-high scrub, but luckily she came down again on this tree, a short distance away. I then spent a couple of minutes tiptoeing carefully through the birch wood until I got to within about three metres of her, and had her entire body in shot with no intervening vegetation. All the while thinking she was an immature Emperor.

The County Recorder for Warwickshire, clearly amused by my idiocy, asked if I might be able find a Lesser Emperor for him as well, but on today's showing I have to say that it's doubtful - and even if I did, I'd probably think it was something else. The Great Odonata Hunter just came down to earth with a bump.