His Maj

I lost an hour of my life this morning, trying and failing to upload some Odonata sightings to iRecord. The site has always been buggy - not really surprisingly, because as an academic project with no commercial spinoff value, I'd guess it's probably run on a shoestring - but every upload I've attempted for the past week has now disappeared in a puff of digital smoke, and by the time I gave up looking for workarounds today, I was absolutely raging.

With not enough time left to go anywhere further away, I resigned myself to repeating my Cleeve Prior beat, around the Community Orchard and the Birmingham Anglers' Association site at Cleeve Mill. At least I can comfort myself that these two sites are currently pretty well recorded. 

The Community Orchard was fairly quiet, but there were several mature Southern Hawkers competing for territory, which is always fun to watch - though slightly less fun when one of their swirling dogfights appears to be heading straight for your face. I managed not to duck, which might have made the situation worse rather than better, but I did take a step back, and they clattered past on rattling wings without including me in their contact sport.

Best of the day at Cleeve Mill was this male Emperor, hanging on a rather autumnal dock and having a quiet think about things, while eliminating the indigestible bits of some recent victims. He was concentrating so hard on this, that I was able to walk right up to him and choose my best angles without him even appearing to notice I was there. It's very unusual to find an undamaged mature Emperor sitting around like this - they normally resemble perpetual motion machines - so I count myself lucky to have been in the right place at just the right time.