Friday Hawker

It would be fair to say that during the extra time I've been spending with the Boy Wonder this month, my everyday tasks have not been taking care of themselves. Looking around at the chaos this morning, I made a half-hearted attempt to restore a measure of order, then gave it up as a bad job and zoomed over to Chipping Norton for a haircut.

Emerging from the hairdresser's an hour later, lighter of head and heart, I gave perhaps five seconds consideration to all the things that needed doing back at home, before squinting at the sunny sky and thinking Dragons. Well, it's the end of the season (ish), so it's not unreasonable to prioritise them, is it? In any event, prioritised is what they were.

If you read my ramblings with any regularity you'll probably recognise this reed bed, which is the closest one to the bank of the Avon at Lucy's Mill Bridge in Stratford. Since the Powers That Be dredged all the reeds from the middle of the river a few weeks ago, depriving the Odonata of oviposition sites and me of the opportunity to shoot from up on the bridge, it's become my go-to Stratford location for dragon photos, and luckily it came through for me again today.

The Odonata count is dropping fast now, but there were at least two male Migrant Hawkers competing for possession of these reeds this afternoon, plus a cruising female, who sadly didn't hang around long enough to have her photo taken. I also saw a couple of male Common Darters, and very surprisingly, a single elderly female Banded Demoiselle - who was surely the last of her kind I'll get the chance to photograph this year.