{"id":368,"date":"2020-09-19T07:47:02","date_gmt":"2020-09-19T06:47:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artofthewild.co.uk\/blog\/?p=368"},"modified":"2020-09-19T07:47:02","modified_gmt":"2020-09-19T06:47:02","slug":"a-case-of-premature-exclamation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevedeeley.bunchadon.co.uk\/?p=368","title":{"rendered":"A case of premature exclamation"},"content":{"rendered":"

For over a year now, I have been searching for a particular dragonfly. Irritatingly, its name – the “common hawker” -suggests it is easily found, but that couldn’t be further from the truth,and it’s actually quite scarce in the south of the UK. It’s a lover of pools which have acidic water, the kind that you find in pine forests and peat bogs, and those are in short supply near where I live. So I have travelled hundreds of miles to places offering the right habitat to try and find it. I have walked miles in the acidic bog areas of Somerset and the New Forest. I have been bitten and scratched, got water inside my welly, and seen… well, a brief glimpse of one would be a charitable answer, because I’m not even sure that the one I saw was a Common Hawker.<\/p>\n

So this year, after lockdown ended, I had another go. I went to a place in Somerset with the delightful name of “Priddy Mineries” where the dragonfly has been seen. In fact, it’s was seen there about twenty minutes after\u00a0 I left the site, empty-handed, last year.\u00a0 Conditions weren’t ideal, as the leading edge of a storm front was crossing over, and it was very windy, and fairly overcast, conditions which are anathema to most dragonflies. But needs must, so off I went, driving along roads that were starting to become familiar, I’ve been to Priddy so often looking for things that turned out not to be there.<\/p>\n

Now don’t get me wrong, Priddy is a fantastic place for wildlife of all stripes, and well worth a visit. But it’s not so pleasing when you’ve gone to find a particular insect and never seen it. I joined a few other dragonfly enthusiast at one of the prime dragonfly pools\u00a0 (known as “odo-nutters”, after the family name for dragonflies, “Odonata”) and we watched and waited. One of my companions cheerfully informed me that he’d photographed one just the day before, right where I was standing. Of course, it had been sunnier then. And less windy.<\/p>\n

After an hour or two, I decided to walk the nearby stands of bracken that were sheltered from the winds by tall pines. I found a dragonfly there – the black darter – that is uncommon if not rare. And then I saw it.<\/p>\n

Zipping expertly in and out of the trees, up and down, like a ping-pong ball on the speakers at a Led Zeppelin concert, was a medium-sized dragonfly. It had the right kind of patter. It was in the right place. And then – miracle of miracles – it settled, something that Common Hawkers rarely do. It had settled on a piece of old heather, which Common Hawkers do on those rare occasions when they stop flying. Serendipity. Everything was coming together. But wait: what was this? It had settled right next to another that I hadn’t spotted. Male and female, side by side. An uncut diamond lying by the side of the road. A huge nugget found with the first strike of the shovel. The kind of story Odonutters tell each other on dark nights over a bottle of Fanta. I screamed aloud. I danced the kind of jig people with two replacement knees dance – a kind of rolling sideways shuffle, if you’re interested -and told passing strangers. I took photo after photo after photo until I couldn’t think of any more photos to take. I went home buzzing.<\/p>\n

When I got home and looked at my pictures. They were lovely images of a two dragonflies side by side. Except they weren’t the Common Hawker. They were a pair of males of the almost-identical Migrant Hawker, far more common in the South. In my excitement, I’d made the classic error of all wildlife-watchers: seeing what I’d expected to see. It’s a mistake I’ve made before and will doubtless make again, but it was particularly galling this time.<\/p>\n

I couldn’t face returning to Priddy, and the Common Hawker flight season ended before I could go anywhere else to look for it. Like so much of our wildlife, from the ephemeral butterflies and dragonflies to the migrant birds that visit us for a while and then leave, I would have to wait for another year for a chance to see it. So here to keep you entertained, is a nice shot of two Migrant Hawkers. I hope you enjoy it, because it’s all you’re getting until Summer 2021<\/p>\n

\"Migrant<\/a>

Migrant hawkers. Pah<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For over a year now, I have been searching for a particular dragonfly. Irritatingly, its name – the “common hawker” -suggests it is easily found, but that couldn’t be further from the truth,and it’s actually quite scarce in the south of the UK. It’s a lover of pools which have acidic water, the kind that […]<\/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-368","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\/368","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=368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevedeeley.bunchadon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevedeeley.bunchadon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevedeeley.bunchadon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevedeeley.bunchadon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}