Predation

I didn't have the best of days at Uckinghall. Electing to walk around one of the lakes before going along the river may have been a mistake, because I met two chaps on the river bank who'd both had an excellent time, dragon-wise, before I turned up. But you win some and lose some, and as both of these people were out-of-towners who'd made special trips to Worcestershire to look for Common Clubtails, I'm very pleased that they found some and went home happy.

This reminds me to tell you that one of my new acquaintances does dragonfly counts at Ham Wall, and he told me that the Four-spotted Chaser roost is now at its spectacular zenith, with dragon numbers in the thousands. The Chasers will disperse as they become sexually mature, and in all probability this mass gathering will only last for a few more days - so if you were thinking of going to see it, I'd strongly recommend you to get a wiggle on and do it this week.

The most abundant damselfly at Uckinhall today was the Common Blue, and I was pleased to capture this male eating his lunch, which I think may have been a non-biting midge in a former life. However, while Odonata are aerial wizards and ferocious predators, they can't always manage to avoid becoming someone else's lunch, and if you're neither squeamish nor arachnophobic, you might enjoy the photo I've just posted to Facebook, which shows a different male Common Blue Damselfly in the grip of a rather magnificent spider.