In the dragon's den

Dragonflies are hard to photograph. In the air they are just too quick. If you have a slow motion camera like I do, you still won't get far as the translucency of the object will make the camera focus past the creature. Yet, in spite of this difficulty I wanted to bring you pictures of these marvelous animals. I needed a strategy. The only picture I have ever taken of a dragonfly before is this one above of a Common Hawker (Aeshna juncea). Picture the scene, it is a hot August day deep in the forested valleys of Northumberland. Three human beings are following the course of a quite stream. The male of the group is slightly ahead and busy assessing the track and looking for navigational indicators, behind him a pair of female humans trudge confidently and noisily in the knowledge that they are not lost. Suddenly one of the females calls the male. The male bounds back and they all pause to observe an object in the grass. The dragonfly was resting. Whilst resting it seemed quite happy to be photographed.

Here was the only strategy that ever worked. To look into the grass and try and find one resting. The other day I walked around Watermead for a while and saw a multitude of butterflies, moths, damselflies and also a good number of dragonflies. I strolled around minding my own business until my eye was drawn to a clump of Tufted Vetch. Then I spotted it. Hanging on to the stem of one of the plants was a monster. It was in fact Britain's largest (by length) insect. With a wingspan of over 10 cm and only a little bit smaller than some of Britain's smallest birds, was a Brown Hawker (Aeshna grandis).

So of course, the first thing that went through my mind is what would this huge thing look like through the bigascope. The first thing I had to decide was which bit to look at as it would not all fit in. So I went for the face.


No matter how close I got with the bigascope I couldn't resolve those huge compound eyes. The dragonfly has the most advanced compound eye in the animal kingdom. The dragonfly itself is the work of 200 million years of perfecting redesign that has given it the best wings, eyes, legs possible. The only way to get better was with a different design altogether. Like the eyes we have.