Gaze

The strangely belated Large Red Damselfly emergence in our garden carried on today: one emerged from the patio pond, and six from the wildlife pond. This, though, is one of yesterday's immatures - the last of three that came out of the patio pond, and the only one not to have flown before nightfall. Yesterday we feared she might have a problem, because two of her wings were creased at the outer edge as though they'd been folded over each other during emergence, and she wasn't even trying to fly. She then got extremely wet in last night's storm, and this morning she had to wait for the sun to move round and hit the pond so she could dry out and warm up - which is what she was still doing when I took advantage of her immobility to capture this photo. About an hour later, she flew away into the nearby trees.

Neither of my two best sightings of the day led to a photo, sadly. As I was going out to the garden centre with R at lunch time, I saw a male Wool Carder bee on the stachys in the front garden, and called myself all kinds of idiot for even stepping out of the door at this time of year without a camera. When we arrived back home there was a female Wool Carder collecting fibres from the same plant, but though I rushed into the house, grabbed the camera and rushed back out again, it was too late: she'd gone. 

Having seen two specimens of this spectacular bee within an hour and a half, I was sure there were bound to be more Wool Carder visits to the stachys during the afternoon, so I decided to do some work in the front garden while I waited for the next photo opportunity. Three hours later I had a much tidier garden, but I hadn't seen so much as a glimpse of the Wool Carders, and the only thing I'd photographed was an irritable and rather bedraggled Silver Y moth, which was pretty poor compensation. 

Never mind. Tomorrow's another potential bee day, and as for today, at least I have a lovely damsel.