Pond Visitors

These are two insects that are found close to water, attracted to my new pond. Footballer hoverfly, so named due to its stripey football-kit colours lays its eggs in shallow pond margins. Large Red Damselfly is rarely found away from standing water, unlike some other damselflies. The latter, a new species for my garden, is one of the earliest dragonflies on the wing in Spring.

#167 Footballer Hoverfly (Helophilus pendulus)

#754 Large Red Damselfly (Pyrrhosoma nymphula)

Damselflies

Not having much of a pond, only a couple of basins, I don’t attract many dragonflies or other aquatic insects, so it was good to see my second (first this year) Blue-tailed Damselfly and also a Beautiful Demoiselle in the garden on consecutive days last week. The blue-tailed damselfly is one of the commonest species and can tolerate quite polluted water, the demoiselle is normally more of a riverside species but I did also have a couple of them in the garden last summer. In addition to these two species the only dragonflies I’ve seen are an Azure Damselfly back in May and a Southern Hawker that was around for a few days last July.

#158 Blue-tailed Damselfly (Ischnura elegans)

500 Species - Azure Damselfly

I was hoping to reach 500 with something special, so here we have a female Azure Damselfly (Coenagrion puella) that was hiding up in the flower bed this evening. In just short of a year I’m half way to reaching 1000 species. This is my first dragonfly in the garden this year, and my fourth species since I started the list. Azure Dragonfly is one of those dragonflies that’s often found away from water in hedges and woodland rides, and is probably the commonest of the blue damselflies in UK.

#500 Azure Damselfly (Coenagrion puella)

#158 Blue-tailed Damselfly

I was wondering when I was going to find my first garden dragonfly or damselfly. Where here he (I think) is; a Blue-tailed Damselfly resting up in my tomato plants.

#158 Blue-tailed Damselfly