Back again

I spent most of the morning helping a mate who is quite new to photography set up his camera to photograph birds and other wildlife. I also seem to have become his personal shopper as I'm ordering some stuff for him off the interweb - him being even more scare of computers than he is of camera manuals!

When the sun came out to stay just be fore he left I thought I'd head back to the Litter Pit, which I found deserted, save for the wildlife. There were not so many dragonflies in evidence at first, but I did find a lone emperor in the bay where the UFD (unidentified flying dragonfly!) was seen yesterday.  It even came close and hovered, but always behind one of the reed leaves at the edge of the small gap I was shooting through. I must have tried over 100 times to get a decent image, and only one was passable with a heavy crop and more sharpening than usual.

At one point I thought an even bigger dragonfly had come into the viewfinder, but it was a kingfisher streaking past. The first I've seen there, and another bird to add to the growing list spotted at the site.

At the little pools there were plenty of damsels, many paired and  mating, a handful of four-spotted chasers and another emperor patrolling the bigger pond. A couple of times I was distracted by shimmering wings bigger than a damsel's but smaller than a chaser's and tracked down a couple of common darters perching low in the stalks by the water's edge.

There were quite a few butterflies in evidence - meadow brown, common blue, skippers, and speckled woods in the trees. These insects really are difficult to stalk, flying off on their erratic paths never quite settling where you think they will, and always low down and obscured when they do making them very tricky to photograph successfully.

And so passed a peaceful couple of hours on a sunny afternoon. If only the place was always undisturbed like this.

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