Cerulean

For the last few years I've been going up the Long Mynd in Shropshire in search of the "acid" dragonflies - Common Hawker, Black Darter and Golden-ringed Dragonfly. But I hate the drive up the Long Mynd - or, more to the point, the drive down it, because that's when you're just a flimsy-looking barrier away from the mountain edge, and a rapid vertical descent of a couple of hundred metres into Carding Mill Valley. I know it's an unlikely kind of accident - certainly in dragonfly weather, in the middle of summer - but every time I make it back down to solid ground in one piece I find myself wondering if I've just used another of my nine lives. And all this is supposed to be fun, right? Rather than being intensely stressful.

So, I've been looking around for alternative sites. Over the past couple of years my best one for Golden-rings has come to be Forest Farm in Cardiff, but that's no longer on my regular beat, so I was glad to be able to tick the Golden-ring box when I was down in Dorset at the beginning of this month. That still left me looking for Common Hawkers and Black Darters though, and today I decided to try Woorgreens Lake and the small pools around Crabtree Hill in south Gloucestershire, to see if I could find any there.

Woorgreens was busy with dragonflies, but mainly the usual suspects: Emperors, Southern Hawkers, Broad-bodied Chasers, and Common Darters. The only unusual specimen I came up with, having walked the entire perimeter, was this male Keeled Skimmer (Orthetrum coerulescens). Slightly away from the lakeside, and just into the section of heath that's grazed by cattle and ponies, I found an almost dry pool being patrolled by a Common Hawker - taking my 2025 list to 32 species, but sadly only giving me blurry record shots. I then walked the heath for a further ninety minutes, looking for more small pools, only to find that every single one I'd mapped was dry. Unsurprisingly, the surrounding ground and vegetation was Odonata-free.

I won't pretend that all this wasn't frustrating, but I'm still pretty happy with this Keeled Skimmer. I'm also quite pleased that - never even having seen a Keeled Skimmer until three weeks ago - I can now identify them confidently on sight. Males are about 5mm shorter than a Black-tailed Skimmer, and far more slender, and they look much more blue, with only the very tip of the tail black rather than the final three or four segments. They also have blue-green eyes, rather than dark green, but the clinchers are their pale shoulder stripes, which you'll never see on a black-tailed skimmer (though to be fair they do also fade on a Keeled Skimmer as it ages), and their orange pterostigmata, which contrast very noticeably with the black wing spots of the Black-tailed Skimmer. The two females are both ochre, but are distinguishable by their size, and the shape and patterning of their abdomens: tapering from thick to thin in the Black-tailed Skimmer, with a black ladder pattern; but slender and parallel-sided in the Keeled Skimmer, with short dark bars crossing the central dark keel. Female Keeled Skimmers also have pale shoulder stripes.