Substitute

I woke at 7.30am to a bright and sunny morning, and R, who'd already been up for some while, said, "I wondered whether I should wake you, so you could go out and look for dragons." I said - and meant it - that on balance I was glad he'd left me sleeping, but when I strolled down to our neighbours' pond a couple of hours later and found four newly-emerged Southern Hawkers still with their exuviae, and at least another four fresh exuviae whose owners had already left.... I wished fervently that I'd got up and got there earlier. Luckily, the owlers' mantra applies just as well to dragon hunting: there's always tomorrow. (Caveat: until the season ends, and there isn't.)

I took an insane number of photos of the Hawkers at J and S's pond, and definitely did not need to be taking any more, but I hadn't checked the ponds in the Cleeve Prior Community Orchard for a week, so after popping back home and having coffee and cake with R I took a quick trip up to Cleeve. With the car park permanently locked it's a bit difficult to park there, and I was annoyed to find a car occupying the space I usually use, but it turned out to belong to an acquaintance I hadn't seen for a while, which was nice. G was out looking for a particular type of orchid, which he hadn't found, but he'd found a Scarce Chaser instead, and showed me a photo of it on his phone. After we'd finished chatting I went looking for his Scarce Chaser, which I failed to find, but in the place where he'd told me to look I happened on this semi-mature male White-legged Damselfly - still slightly putty-coloured in places, but starting to turn blue. It felt like a reasonable substitute.

After taking several hundred photos of the Southern Hawkers this morning, I'm surprised to find myself posting something else tonight. But I find damselfly faces hard to resist, and this pale blue gaze is especially pleasing. Also, I nailed the focus on his eyes, which given that he was clinging to a grass stalk in breezy conditions wasn't all that easy to achieve. So yay me.

R: C2, D4.