Headstand

I was on my way to Trench Wood this afternoon, but en route I thought I'd stop in at the two Odonata sites I'm monitoring at Cleeve Prior, to see if there was anything going on there. The Community Orchard was virtually an Odonata-free zone, but down at the River Avon at Cleeve Prior Mill I witnessed some more interesting Banded Demoiselle behaviour that I hadn't seen before. I ended up spending so long walking from back and forth between the fishing pegs, in the hope that one of the little groups of Banded Demoiselles there would do something else unexpected, that I never made it to Trench Wood at all. 

The story began when a female demoiselle came to the river, and signalled her desire to mate by enticing a group of males to chase her. They all set off, and zoomed up and down for a few minutes in a kind of procession. Then she dropped onto the surface of the water and lay on her side, as you can see in my first extra. At this point one of the males dived head-first into the water and grabbed her - though whether he'd been her closest pursuer, or just happened to be nearest when the music stopped and managed to get to the chair first, I really can't say. In any case she promptly responded to his grip on her pronotum, as the main image shows, and began to pull herself upright.

Then, while I was looking around and wondering where they would settle to copulate, and hoping it might be somewhere that gave me a chance to photograph them, they both took off, flew over to where I was standing, landed on my trousers, and formed the mating wheel. I said, "Oh, mate. Seriously? Just no, OK?" - because I was using the 100-500 lens at the time (minimum focus distance 90cm), and my macro was several hundred metres away, locked in the boot of the car. But they seemed happy in their choice of perch, so I got my phone out of my pocket and took several dodgy photos and a few seconds of shaky video - none of which activity seemed to disturb my new best friends in the slightest. I'm not great with a phone camera in any situation (as several tourists who've made the mistake of asking me to photograph them on theirs could attest), but given that I was standing on a three-foot square wooden platform, with binoculars round my neck, a large camera hanging off my right shoulder, and a phone enclosed in a folding wallet... I think I can reasonably say that today's circumstances were less than ideal. In fact, manipulating the folding phone cover, and then angling and operating the camera so as to take a photo of a pair of insects half way down the outside of my left thigh, without either disturbing them or dropping anything in the river, was like some kind of unhinged Saturday night gameshow challenge. I've included my least out-of-focus effort as a second extra, because it proves both the story, and that I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm useless with a phone camera.

All the time I was fiddling with the phone and using unbecoming language, I was trying to remember how long Banded Demoiselles remain in cop. Ninety seconds, I thought, and I'm happy to say that this turned out to be correct - had they been Southern Hawkers, I could have been standing there for two hours. As soon as they separated, the female flew off to oviposit, and narrowly missed being plucked out of the air as an afternoon snack by one of the local Mallards. When I saw the duck surging towards her, I made a squawking noise that sounded so like a Mallard alarm call that I'm surprised it didn't put the entire flock to flight.

I don't know how the Banded Demoiselles felt about all of this drama, but I was absolutely shattered, and had to go home afterwards for a cup of tea and a bit of a sit-down.