I remember commenting a while back how our season can be restricted to six months; I’ve never personally felt the need to search for stragglers in November. I’ll leave that to others.
While it’s always a pleasure to seek out those first Large Red of the season, the rest of April is invariably a disappointment, wasted days waiting for a little diversity to ramp up the pace.
May is when the season really starts, when that diversity reaches double-figures and you can almost be forgiven to be guaranteed a good day. Except even when you restrict the days you can still have disappointments.
I was hoping a return trip to Bramshill would offer up more numbers and a little more diversity. There were more of the same, but not in the numbers I expected, and a couple of expected newcomers.
My first grateful sighting was a Grizzled Skipper clinging to the sparse vegetation fringing the main track; a resident of this site, their previous two hot-spots now unsuitable due to too much scrub growth.
Shortly afterwards I had my first Beautiful Demoiselles right where I expected them to be, and again scattered throughout the site in small pockets of warm micro-climate.
The path down to the ponds usually provides one or two encounters and today there was an immature male Red-eyed and a female Downy Emerald flitting from perch to perch, neither of which improved on the previous visits shot.
Another couple of females graced my walk to the center ponds, however it was an immature male which gave me a better opportunity.
The pond-side vegetation was devoid of the expected damsel swarms so I continued on through miles of forest pathways until I spotted a male Hairy fly off into the distance and a few Banded Demoiselles parked up sun-bathing, including this accommodating male.
So a couple of opportunities and a few more species encountered but I have to say I was disappointed to not see more, especially a Four-spotted Chaser or two which should be all over the site by now.