On the bog

An excellent afternoon at the Natural England/British Dragonfly Society event at Chartley Moss NNR in Staffordshire. This superb reserve, one of the few examples of a floating peat bog in the UK, is rarely open to the public, so we were very fortunate that our visit coincided with a hot sunny day, ideal for watching dragonflies.

The main object of the day was to see White-faced Darter, which was a new species for me, and we saw about ten in total, mostly over the pools. I totally failed to get close enough to any of these to photograph them, having a) opted to take only my 105mm macro lens rather than the big zoom, and b) very generously lent John my wellies after he forgot to bring his, which meant that I had the choice of either staying away from the edge of the water on the slightly drier bits, or getting wet feet!

John wearing my wellies

Skev (wearing his own wellies) slowly sinks into the bog

Some people looking at dragonflies

However, after a lot of searching I finally found this approachable teneral (newly emerged) darter perched on some heather away from the pool, and was then very glad that I had brought the macro lens:

All in all a very enjoyable day; thanks to John, Mark and Jim for their company, and to John for booking the places on the event. And of course the weather gods for giving us perfect weather for a change!