Migrant vs Southern

Well, this is a surprise. After all the gadding about of the last couple of weeks, I decided to give the dragons a rest today, and stay home to work on my editing and recording backlogs. After several hours of processing and culling image files, and uploading a couple of hundred reports to iRecord, I gave myself a coffee break and wandered out into the garden with the small camera, where I very quickly got three nice bees on wild flowers in a corner of the top garden. Then I walked down to the wild garden, just to see if anything was around, and discovered that it was absolutely teeming with overexcited insects, chasing each other around what in effect is a woodland glade, knocking each other off favoured perches, and generally zooming about. 

I counted six species of butterfly: Speckled Wood, Comma, Gatekeeper, Meadow Brown, Large White and Holly Blue; as well as numerous bees, flies, and hoverflies. There was also a female Beautiful Demoiselle flitting about, which wasn't a surprise because R and I saw a mixed pair in the wild garden last weekend, but whenever she landed she chose perches that were too high for anything better than record shots. Then a medium sized dragonfly shot past me, pursued by a larger one which I could see was a Southern Hawker, and when the smaller dragon managed to loop out of its pursuer's sight line and landed in a hazel tree, I realised it was a female Migrant Hawker. 

The Migrant Hawker is a late-season species - as far as I can see, checking back though my files, the earliest I've ever recorded one before was on July 26, but usually they turn up some time in the first half of August - and for a couple of seconds I was so surprised that I simply stared at this specimen, not quite believing that it wasn't something else. Then I suddenly woke up, looked at the camera, realised a macro lens was not the tool for this job, and scuttled off back to the house for the big gear. Very luckily, when I arrived back, hot and breathless, the Migrant was still in her tree - and better still the Southern Hawker then came back as well, circled the glade a couple of times, and settled in a conifer - so I got to photograph them both.

If you compare the two photos you'll see that the Southern Hawker in the second image is much more boldly marked than the Migrant. This is partly because it's a male - female dragonflies tend to be secretive, and their colouring reflects this, whereas the males are wont to flaunt themselves - but the two bold stripes on the front of the thorax (sometimes called 'headlights'), and the bright paired spots along the abdomen, joining to form broad stripes across the last two abdominal segments, are characteristic. This male is barely mature (I suspect his interest in the smaller dragon may have been sexual, rather than territorial or predatory), and the colour of his eyes and his abdominal markings will continue to deepen for a while yet. 

The Migrant Hawker, being female, is always going to be a little drab, but she's also a young adult, and in time the spots on her abdomen that are currently lilac will turn a dull greeny yellow. She has very faint antehumeral thoracic stripes, and broader ones on the sides of her thorax, which will also become yellower over time, and her eyes will deepen to a greeny brown colour. Male Migrants are predominantly blue and brown, with blue eyes, and female Southerns are brown and apple green. Size-wise, Migrant Hawkers average around 6cm in overall length, with a hindwing length of about 4cm, whereas Southern Hawkers are around 7cm long and their hindwing length is closer to 5cm. Those aren't dramatic differences on paper, but seeing the two flying close together, they were very obvious indeed.