As with the blue and black Damselflies and the Red Darters, correctly identifying Hawker Dragonflies can be very tricky. I spotted this wonderful creature (about 6cm in length) very close to the brand-new wildlife pond that my Daughter and I have just created in the garden, but it wont have emerged from there unless the larvae somehow managed to arrive tucked inside the root system of one of the water plants when we added them to the pond. Oh, my money’s on a female Common Hawker by the way, but I could easily be wrong!

God must have looked back on the day that He, She or It came up with the idea of Dragonflies and Damselflies as an extremely good day….As the day that one of the most remarkable pieces of bio-engineering in the history of life on Planet Earth was created. Mind you, God must have equally regretted deciding to knock-off early that Friday lunchtime, leaving the first-year apprentices in the Creation Department with a whole afternoon of mischief-making ahead of them as they churned out disaster after disaster….from Mosquitoes to the 1980s, from Midges to Reality TV, from dog cr*p and Religion to lawyers and politicians….Oh….and let’s not forget the human knee-joint while we’re at it….Who in the name of all that’s eternal would have been spiteful and/or malicious enough to come up with such a totally stupid design as that?