Blue Chaser, Take Two

After spending the morning sorting out financial stuff at my desk I decided it was time to tackle the small mountain of errands I'd amassed, so I devised a round-Warwickshire tour that would encompass them all. Somehow it also managed - don't ask me how! - to take in the Heart of England Forest at Barton, where I'd barely stepped onto the river bank when this Scarce Chaser zoomed past me. He was working rather a clever circuit between the river and the hay meadow, using the recently cleared pathways to the fishing pegs as corridors, appearing and disappearing at high speed, and mopping up small unwary insects - or "food", as I'm sure he thinks of them - as he went.

The strimmed vegetation here forms an execrable background, but my efforts to capture him against a better one proved entirely useless because he was warm, alert, and well fed, and treated my attempts to sneak up on him with the contempt they clearly deserved. When I pushed my luck just a little too far he disappeared altogether, and I knew I'd blown it. Still, I think this image works pretty well as a companion piece to Saturday's immature specimen - all Odonata undergo a certain amount of colour change as they mature and then age, but I can't think of another British species that changes as dramatically as this.

I caught a brief glimpse of a second, immature and tawny, Scarce Chaser on nettles at the feeder stream while I was looking for demoiselles, but he was also warm and skittish, and I failed to capture his portrait before he took off. Luckily, the female Beautiful Demoiselle in my second image was much more placid and tolerant.

R: C2, D13.