Spinner

The light this afternoon wasn't as kind as yesterday's, and I suspected that there would be fewer demoiselles around, but I went back to the Heart of England stretch of the River Avon at Barton anyway because I wanted to test the R7. When I first bought it I set it up with two back focus buttons, one for eye tracking and the other for centre pin-point focus, and this worked very well, but though it's a good little camera it has some issues, and one of them is that it's unusually easy to change its settings by accident, which is what recently happened to mine. This morning I found the on line tutorial I'd originally consulted, restored the camera to factory settings, and then set it back up as I wanted.

As I'd expected, the Banded Demoiselles weren't really playing out at Barton - in fact most of them were sitting deep in the nettles and only moving when I brushed past them - but I found enough (painfully, in some cases) to test my autofocus and be reassured that it's back to working as I prefer. Still, I didn't love any of the shots I took with it today, which is why I'm posting an image I took with the R5 and the 100mm macro.

This is a Common Mayfly (Ephemera vulgata), identifiable from the line of dark triangles on the upper side of the abdomen; the fact that it's a male is obvious from his large eyes and the pincer-like structures at the base of his tails. I first noticed him dancing up and down in mid-air in an effort to attract a mate, but after a while he sank into the grass to rest, and I was able to take his portrait.

Mayflies are interesting in having two adult stages. When the fully grown larvae first emerge from the water they eclose as a dull brown, winged sub-imago called (appropriately) a 'dun'. There were a lot of these little brown guys flying around the nettle beds on the river bank today. Those that survive long enough to become fully mature will then moult one last time into this final imago form, with patterned wings and three long tails, which is called a 'spinner'. From then on they will be completely focused on finding a mate and completing their life cycle, after which they don't live very long - though I'm happy to say that the commonly held belief that they only ever live for one day is a myth.