Although pretty familiar with fellow genus member Libellula depressa the Broad Bodied Chaser, which will soon feature in a fuller post, complete with HD video, this dragonfly was a new one on my species list. They’re not uncommon, but my regular dragonfly hunting ponds don’t suit them for some reason, so I was pleased to find plenty of these around a different local pond earlier this summer.
They’re pretty big insects, up to around 5cm and very active so quite easy to spot. They also have the habit of repeatedly returning to the same perch rather like Broad Bodied Chasers, which obviously helps the photographer. Unfortunately this individual kept returning to the end of the same stick in almost exactly the same position, so although I was able to get quite a few pictures, they were more or less identical. A little positional variety would have been nice and a macro lens would have been even nicer as this individual was far too intent on hunting small flies in the late afternoon sun to worry about me. Having no waders with me, I had to stick to the telephoto zoom lens as the favoured perch was a little too far into the boggy margin, but then that’s kind of why my wife bought me the zoom in the first place.
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