Christine's walking & birds blog

An azure hawker was patrolling the boggy forest ride and sometimes landing on the path ahead.

On a rocky area overlooking the loch, there was a second individual.

The absence of any yellow markings and the narrow stripes on the side of the thorax help to distinguish the azure from the common hawker; one of these was present along the rides two days ago.

Also present two days ago was this smaller dragonfly which landed briefly in the heather before vanishing.

It appears to be a northern emerald - probably a female. I haven't seen one in this spot before and last year I failed to see a northern emerald at all, so it was a nice find. A bid by developers to buy part of the land up here in order to build a load of "luxury eco-lodges" was turned down in April after protests by residents - but the last I heard, they were trying again, with more modest proposals. I wonder how important the presence of two rare-ish dragonfly species might be in the scheme of things? Probably not very - "they" would just argue that there's still plenty of moorland and bog and forest for them across the hill. This is the problem though; developers always say that wildlife can move somewhere else. One day there'll be nowhere else, and that will be that.