New Forest

Yesterday (the 9th) saw Phil Rogers and I heading south to Hampshire on our way to the Isle of Wight. Although our crossing was booked for this morning we thought it might pay dividends if we stayed overnight as it would give us an opportunity to explore the New Forest area. While the weather was less than perfect we did manage to find some good stuff including a new species for me.

Latchmore Brook and New Forest Ponies.

Beginning at Latchmore Brook we followed the brook itself and also walked alongside some of the many runnels and seepages in the area searching for damsels and dragons. The first damsel of the day was also the best, a beautiful Scarce Blue-tailed  of the aurantiaca form. As well as being very attractive it was also a new species for me and one that I very much wanted to see with this bright orange variation in particular on my wish list. This runnel turned out to be fairly productive as we also found two Small Red Damselflies and also a bog standard Blue-tailed. Rather annoyingly a very good candidate for a Southern Damselfly was flushed by a dog taking a dip just as it looked about to settle. A little further along we saw at least two Beautiful Demoiselles.

Scarce Blue-tailed Damselfly and Beautiful Demoiselle.

What appeared to be a good start soon proved to be something of a false dawn because despite increasing amounts of sunshine we saw very little else! My first Common Darter of the year turned out to be the only dragon on site and there were no more damsels. Of the birds seen or heard a male Redstart was the best though a Spotted Flycatcher was a welcome find and a croaking Raven also did a flypast. Reptiles provided one of the high points as both Adder, a species I rarely see, and Common Lizard were seen.

Sundew and Broad-bodied Chaser.

From here we moved on to Eyeworth Pond which was created to provide a water source for a gunpowder factory. Highlight here was a cracking male Broad-bodied Chaser, for some reason or another I never see many during the season and the males in particular are one of my favourite dragons. Little else to report though we added Red-eyed to our meagre day total and also saw our only butterfly of the day, a male Brimstone. A drake Mandarin was the only bird of interest and having decided that we were not going to see much else we travelled over to our hotel on the outskirts of Southampton.