The outlier

My poor mother is used to me getting distracted by dragonflies when we go for a walk.  This time we were going to see the walled garden at Wallington Hall in Northumberland when I spotted a dragonfly over the Garden Pond.  We could both see it was brown although it flew almost constantly and it was obviously a hawker.  Each time it landed it disappeared high into the trees out of view.  Eventually I got lucky and it landed in view.

It is a poor photo but good enough to confirm our identification as a brown hawker.  One other photo shows the dragonlfy had landed to eat a fly it had caught - you can make out the wings of its prey.

I tried a flight shot but it was very difficult in the light.  This was the only one worth keeping, just a record shot.

Brown hawkers are rare in Northumberland.  There are no previous records in iRecord (the national online recording system used by the British Dragonfly Society) since it began in 2009.  The BDS Atlas of Dragonflies in Britain and Ireland published in 2014 says:

In northern England it is on the edge of its current range in Northumberland with only isolated, mainly historical, records with little evidence of a breeding population.  The most recent are single records from Morpeth and Alnwick in 2003 and 2004 respectively.

The national distribution pattern is strange.  The brown hawker is found across the Midlands (Mum even has them in her garden) and the South and East but is absent from the South West and from most of Wales.  It is also not found in Scotland.  My record is shown on the map in the outline of the vice-county of South Northumberland at the top.

So this is the first local record for 15 years.  My guess is that a small local breeding population might exist but this could also be an exploring single male from farther south.  I'll try to get back in the next few days to have another look.