Dinner time

The first full day of the family holiday came in overcast, with a threat of rain, but R and I went off out anyway, to explore the marked nature trails around the estate. Lower Mill encompasses about ten of the listed pits within the Cotswold Water Park, and though some of them are at least partly accessible via public footpaths, others lie entirely within the estate, safeguarded by fences whose gates have coded locks. This can be extremely annoying if there happens to be a rare bird on one of them and you can't legally get at it, but as a resident it means that you can enjoy some wonderfully peaceful walks, through countryside that's managed to meet the needs of both holidaymakers and wildlife. One of the lakes, Flagham Fen, is heavily fenced to keep in the family of beavers which was introduced there twenty years ago, and though I have no expectation of actually seeing a beaver this week, it's still somehow rather nice to think that they're noodling around doing their beavery thing in the woodland at the edge of the lake.

This afternoon the sky cleared and the sun came out, and as we were walking back towards Howell's Mere from the swimming pool a large hawker sailed past us. This was all the encouragement I needed to grab the camera and get back out onto the nature reserve, where I almost tripped over this female Black-tailed Skimmer on the gravel path between Flagham Fen and Somerford Lagoon. As males of this species are renowned for basking on paths I assumed that she was sitting around in the hope of meeting a mate, and it was only when I saw my photos on a big screen that I realised she'd actually been chewing her way through a large insect. I've peered closely at all my images and I still can't make out what the prey might have been in its former life, but it was big enough to have occupied her fully for the couple of minutes it took me to approach to within what I think of as 'eye facet distance'. At this point I realised that I was in danger of missing my own dinner - or worse, keeping six other people waiting for theirs - so I left her still busily chewing and hot-footed it back to the village.

If you're interested, and have a relatively strong stomach, there are short films of dragons eating large insects here and here. The received wisdom is that they'll only tackle prey items that are smaller than their own head, but there's another film here - which I don't recommend unless you're hard of heart as well as stomach - that shows one removing the abdomen from a live Monarch butterfly, entirely unfazed by the unfortunate creature's desperate struggles.