Another Weldon Walk

So far this week the weather has been somewhat challenging with sunny interludes of varying length and a brisk and somewhat cool breeze affecting things to quite a degree. Today followed the same pattern and I took my exercise walk down to Weldon hoping that my visit might coincide with one of the day's sunnier spells.

Male Banded Demoiselle and violacea form Blue-tailed Damselfly.

My visit was fairly brief and didn't include either interesting birds or any butterflies at all. Luckily a few damselflies were still active along the stream at both the pocket park and near the woodland park. One of these was a newly emerged male Banded Demoiselle which appeared to get stuck in amongst some goose grass. I was able to get him out of his predicament without any obvious damage and he sat on my finger tip for a few seconds before flying off. Other Banded Demoiselles managed to avoid any similar mishaps though most where sheltering out of the breeze deep within the nettles. Since my last visit there appears to have been an emergence of Blue-tailed Damselflies and these included a very fresh looking female of the violacea form. A single male Large Red Damselfly was noted though he was outnumbered by Azures.

Male Variable and Azure Damselflies.

The variation which gave Variable Damselflies their name is very useful when trying to judge the population size of small colonies like the one at Weldon. The markings on the male that I saw today differed from the previous two which means that including females at least four and probably five different Variables have been recorded so far. As only a relatively small area of the extensive nettle beds is in view from the path I can only speculate on how many of these scarce insects are present. I'm hoping that with the forecast drop in the wind strength that more damsels and dragons will appear in the next few days.

Pheasant.