Dragons and Damsels

Now that summer's here, lovely high pressure and warm southerlies (now and then) it's good weather for dragonflies and damselflies. What's the difference? Not much really - the big damselflies are about the same size as the small dragonflies, although generally they're slighter and daintier. But there is one very obvious morphological difference between the two groups: damsels' eyes don't touch in the middle of their heads but dragons' do. So there you are. This one is a fabulously beautiful Red-veined Darter Sympetrum fonscolombei photographed by Island odonata maestro Dave Dana. It's quite common in southern Europe but is turning up more and more regularly as a migrant in the UK. It's hard to imagine these little things travelling such huge distances but there is quite a list of regular migrant species that visit us annually and so it's more than mere accident. We monitor dragonflies at all of our major wetland sites as they can be very useful indicators of the general health of the habitats we're working on.