Vibrating

I went into Stratford with R this morning, to act as devil's advocate while he chose a new car. It took hours. By the time we left the garage, R having bought the model he'd been planning on getting all along, we were both vibrating from the amount of coffee we'd drunk, and slightly light headed for want of lunch. This is my only excuse for uttering the word "Pizza?" - a foodstuff I normally try to avoid, because it doesn't really agree with either me or the bathroom scales - but that said, pizza turned out to be exactly what we both needed at this juncture, and I enjoyed every fattening mouthful.

While R was paying the restaurant bill I hot-footed it down to the river after a photo, captured a few Black-headed Gulls in nice light, and then decided to yomp on down to Lucy's Mill, in search of a Migrant Hawker. Which is exactly what I got: a single male Migrant Hawker, on the reeds below the footbridge. He was also vibrating, but in his case it was from a need to warm his flight muscles, rather than a surfeit of caffeine. It surprised me that he was so cold, because even though the day had started chilly, and it had rained heavily for about an hour at lunchtime, by this point it was sunny and warm. But there was still a pretty stiff breeze blowing, and the dragon was flying in and out of shadow, as hawkers like to do. This must have been enough to depress his temperature, because he was alternating quite short flights with brief rests on one or another sunny leaf, during which he would vibrate his wings until the muscles were warm enough for him to confidently resume his patrol.