This was not a bad start to my dragonfly year. There was only one flying but it was a beautiful female broad-bodied chaser (Libellula depressa). Several times she paused for a photo.
This week there were lots of large red damselflies, mainly mature males
and I saw one mating pair.
Others have begun to emerge. This is an immature male azure damselfly.
And a teneral common blue,
an immature female common blue,
and one mature male.
Butterflies included several male walls
and a dingy skipper, only the second time I have seen one here.
Next week I hope to see a male broad-bodied chaser and four-spotted chasers.
Right on schedule the eggs have hatched. First thing yesterday morning there were six chicks and three eggs and yesterday evening only one egg remained. By this morning all nine eggs have hatched and the parents are in full feeding mode. They deliberately select very small caterpillars at this stage and have timed it just right with the weather.
Here are a couple of short video clips from yesterday morning and this morning.
Lots of other nests in the garden are at a similar stage. I can hear chicks calling from nests containing tree sparrows, great tits and starlings and see blue tits taking food into other boxes. Within a couple of weeks the garden will be full of fledgelings. These birds are due to fly on 1st or 2nd June. Regular updates on their progress will be on the "Nestbox camera 2019" page accessed via the tab at the top of this page.
Like most of us, bumblebees take time to get going in the morning. I found this one early yesterday in bright sunshine but with an air temperature of only 2 or 3℃. It is a mountain bumblebee queen (Bombus monticola), still not warm enough to fly comfortably. Perhaps the most attractive bumblebee, it is also known as the bilberry bumblebee, appropriate here as it was sheltering at the base of bilberry plants. It was shy about having its photo taken and flew of without striking a better pose than these.
The weather has been cold and wet this week and only picked up in the last couple of days. Because of that I didn't get to visit the pond until this morning. When I arrived it was sunny but there was a heavy rain shower as I left. Perhaps not surprisingly I saw no damselflies or dragonflies. There was plenty of birdsong, mostly from birds hidden from sight (including blackcap, chaffinch, yellowhammer, song thrush and blackbird) but I did catch sight of a singing sedge warbler
and a willow warbler. The lens I carry, mainly for dragonflies, isn't ideal for small birds at a distance but at least you can see what they are.
The coot is still sitting on her eggs.
Although there were no damselflies to be seen, plenty of other insects were flying. Butterflies included green veined white
and a female orange tip.
I also saw common carder bees and this early bumblebee (Bombus pratorum).
I have only rarely seen roe deer here although they are around. In several places there is evidence of the bucks rubbing their antlers against the trees, to scrape off their velvet and leave a scent mark. It doesn't do the trees much good.
The forecast for next week is better so I hope there will be more damsels and dragons.
A few more recent otter pictures, this time recorded after dark using infrared video cameras. These days I usually record only video and take one or two frame grabs from the video. The otters here are a bit too close the the camera and slightly out of focus so the frame grabs aren't very clear. I have continued to experiment with back lighting and I think it is working well. Normally the light fades off very quickly with distance so the background is very dark. I use a small 12V infrared LED with a rechargeable battery and leave it switched on. It then comes on when night falls and stays on until the battery runs down.
I now have two battery LEDs so I can record on consecutive nights but I haven't yet tried them both together. The videos work well, although they are less clear than in the daytime, but I think I need to get the cameras slightly farther back from the otters.
The first red mason bees emerged very early this year, probably encouraged by the warm weather at Easter. Since then it has been cold and most of the bees in the bee house and in the south wall of the house have yet to emerge. Most of those I see are in and around three dead sycamores near the front door. I drilled a lot of holes in the trees last year, most of which face south and west. The male red mason bees sleep in the holes overnight and peer out of them in the morning, waiting for things to warm up. They have powerful mandibles, used for chewing their way out of their cocoons and mud-walled cells.
Here are a few more portraits.
This one is a female. She has a black face with two horns used for building the mud walls in the nest hole - hence her name Osmia bicornis. She also has pollen on her face.
Sometimes the bees come out and crawl round to the sunny side of the trunk to help them warm up.
Here we go! Right on schedule, the first damselflies of the year. I saw several large red damselflies (Pyrrhosomanymphula) of both sexes when I visited earlier this week. This is predictably the first species of the season and reports of emergence have been spreading up the country over the past couple of weeks, consistent with spring travelling north at 1.8 miles per hour. These are immature females with pale colours and yellow shoulder stripes.
And these are immature males, also with yellow shoulder stripes which will turn red with maturity.
This week's butterflies included orange-tips. They have been present for the past few weeks but this is the first time I have managed a photo as they rarely stop for a rest. These are males
and females, all feeding on lady's smock.
The coot is still sitting on her eggs and the goslings still number eight.
With luck and good weather we may see the first dragonfly next week.
