Emerald Damselfly, jewel in the invert crown

I make no apologies for the lack of birding content in the blog, now or over the coming weeks. My interest in the summer season deepens year on year into the world of inverts. Of course I still bird, but there is nothing really I can or want to blog about bird wise during the breeding season at present. Inverts present a challenge to ID sometimes, but I'm just enjoying what I see, I have the cold dark winter nights to nail all the names where they escape me ! In the end, it will all be submitted to WBRC ( Worcestershire Biological Records centre )
Last Saturday I started my day at Grimley. Here I encountered my first Meadow Browns of the year, c12.

My first Meadow Brown of the year

In fact it was to be a day of firsts. There were plenty of Azure and Blue-tailed Damselflies, but it took me a while to nail down my first White Legged Damselfly of the year, an immature ♀ , in the lactea ( milky- milky ) phase.

White -legged Damselfly  (immature ♀ ,f.lactea phase)

Shortly afterwards, the first Black Tailed Skimmer of the year broke cover. I had 2 on the site in total, well down on numbers, and hankering down the grass

Black-tailed Skimmer

There were two other nice sightings before moving on. A single Silver Y moth,

Silver Y

and a bit of orthoptera,

I then popped to Monkwood village. The Burnet situation is poor at present, just one flyby. The only invert of any real interest I saw was this Yellow Shell Moth. However I did find what looks like a Common Spotted Orchid, I'm currently in the process of checking the ID, along with the Orthoptera.



Yellow Shell

 It was then onto Monkwood. I had no huge expectations to be honest, but it was warm and pleasant and  as I headed to the pools, I came across my first Large Skippers of the year.

There was plenty of  Diptera buzzing about, I'm glad I deeted up, much as I love inverts, you can be eaten alive at this place if you are not careful !
Anyway, within a few seconds of arriving at the pool, I had Emerald Damselfly in front of me. This was a bit of a surprise, I honestly didn't think they would be around yet, given the lag this year, so it tuned out to be a first record for VC37 so far, which was nice.

Emerald damselfly, so nice to see

And the day didn't end there. Not Only did I watch a fairly teneral Emperor Dragonfly( a year first too) munching a Large Red Damselfly, I also was lucky enough to see a colony of Brown China Mark Moths and some more Orthoptera in the shape of Dark Bush Crickets
What a corking day !

Dark Bush Cricket

Brown China-mark moth

More images on my flickr