{"id":291,"date":"2020-05-11T12:57:21","date_gmt":"2020-05-11T11:57:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artofthewild.co.uk\/blog\/?p=291"},"modified":"2020-05-11T12:57:21","modified_gmt":"2020-05-11T11:57:21","slug":"lockdown-diaries-4th-may","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevedeeley.bunchadon.co.uk\/?p=291","title":{"rendered":"Lockdown diaries 4th May"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today was a day for the Odonoata or dragonflies to really start to show up. In my local area are some ponds, part of a flood relief scheme, and over the last few years they have sprouted, like a developing beard, the tall stems and fluffy heads of reedmace (called bullrush when I was young) and the sharp, spiked points of rushes. These shallow, warm pools are the perfect habitat for dragonflies, and I have watched over the years as the number of species has slowly increased. Today was the turn of the broad-bodied chaser, a corpulent dragonfly that looks rather unfortunately as though its back end has been run over by a car. But when recently emerged, as this one was, they are the colour of freshly poured gold.<\/p>\n<p>Also emergent were some large red damselflies, which as the name suggests are larger than most damselflies and also&#8230; well, red. But then I spotted one which intrigued me. Now I should explain that damselflies are hugely challenging to identify because:<\/p>\n<p>a) there are lot of different species often found flying together<\/p>\n<p>b) A lot of the species look very similar indeed, and often come in colour variants &#8211; so exactly the same species can come in different colours. A bit like people, when you think about it.<\/p>\n<p>c) young damselflies (called &#8220;tenerals&#8221;) change colour, sometimes dramatically so.<\/p>\n<p>So a young damselfly of one species may look very much like a youngster or an adult from a different species. In some cases a correct identification may depend on a microscopic check on the shape of very small parts of this very small insect. In this case, the blue eye spots are like a common blue. The markings on the side probably rule out the Azure. I&#8217;m fairly sure it is a teneral female blue-tailed damselfly. But it could be a teneral emerald. Or perhaps something else. I&#8217;ll let you decide<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/stevedeeley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/MG_7220m1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-292 \" style=\"width: 403px;\" title=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/stevedeeley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/MG_7220m1-403x570.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"403\" height=\"570\" data-large-rendition=\"http:\/\/stevedeeley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/MG_7220m1-807x1140.jpg\" data-full-rendition=\"http:\/\/stevedeeley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/MG_7220m1.jpg\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/www.artofthewild.co.uk\/blog\/?attachment_id=292\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today was a day for the Odonoata or dragonflies to really start to show up. In my local area are some ponds, part of a flood relief scheme, and over the last few years they have sprouted, like a developing beard, the tall stems and fluffy heads of reedmace (called bullrush when I was young) [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevedeeley.bunchadon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevedeeley.bunchadon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevedeeley.bunchadon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevedeeley.bunchadon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevedeeley.bunchadon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevedeeley.bunchadon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevedeeley.bunchadon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevedeeley.bunchadon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevedeeley.bunchadon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}