High Fashion and Green Metal in an Essex Summer: The Lestidae Damselflies

 As it is (ed: Not long past) Christmas, and I have already written of a decidedly Christmassy species, I thought, in the dark of St Stephen’s Night, to revisit the insects with which I spent a privileged summer, through the coastal marshes of Essex. The Lestidae damselflies, or Emerald Damselflies, come in a range of shades from key lime pie green, to metallic fir tree tinsel green, some bearing a dusty blue pruinescence. They are desperately fashionable too, subject of many treatises, management plans and UK Wildlife Podcasts, in part because of their undoubted beauty, more subtle than that of the splendid Calopteryx spp - perhaps more of them later- and less easily spotted than the big Aeshnids I wrote about before. Essex is their spiritual home- and arguably one of the epicentres of their remarkable colonisation of these islands. All four breeding species are found in the county, and I had the privilege of meeting them all over the summer of 2022.

Scarce Emerald Damselfly nomming a Blue Tailed Damselfly (Ishnura elegans)

Willow Emerald Damselfy, RSPB Bowers' Marsh, Essex. 

My first encounter with these splendid creatures was a couple of years ago at RSPB Rainham Marshes, where I met a gorgeous, deep bronze green insect hanging serenely on some wetland tree that may or may not have been the one from which it took its common name. This slim and delicate creature was a Willow Emerald (Chalcolestes viridis) a stunning creature which immediately caught my eye, especially as it was October, when all but the hardiest Common Darters and Migrant Hawkers had reached the end of their season. The Willow Emerald is unique among British odonata as it does not lay its eggs in water, but instead, in neat incisions made in woody vegetation overhanging water with a modified ovipositor. I have witnessed them laying eggs like this while still in tandem, the male gripping the female with his anal claspers, protecting, or jealously guarding her. From these eggs the tiny prolarvae emerge in spring, and drop into the water below to continue their life cycle, much more typically. Any which fail to find water do not make it, but conversely, being to an extent free of the need for water during late summer oviposition offers an advantage in a drying climate.  This species was first recorded breeding in the UK in something like 2009, in Suffolk. On a September walk by the Thames at Tilbury in 2022, with my good friend Chris, we found hundreds of these beautiful, bronze green insects, hanging out on Brambles tens of metres from fresh water. It is a species which has undergone a meteoric rise. Look for an all-green Damselfly, sometimes shimmering bronze in the sunshine as the light catches its iridescence, with clear wings (mind those flashy Calopteryx!) white pterostigmas (the dots in the ‘outboard’ corners of the wings), hanging out on marginal woody vegetation near still or slow-moving water.

Willow Emerald, Tilbury, September 2022

A few years later, while walking among the ditches at an EWT nature reserve way off the beaten track yet not too far from Basildon. Hanging on a branch, apparently relatively freshly emerged, was a beautiful male Scarce Emerald (Lestes dryas). Contrary to its English name, this species seemed very numerous on the sites where it lived. A hulking brute of a damselfly, size being a key if not universally reliable way of separating it from the smaller Emerald Damselfly (Lestes sponsa), and another species identified as having a distinct upward population trend, it likes Sea Clubrush choked ditches, sometimes to the consternation of site managers irked by its insistence on enjoying exactly the habitats wading birds do not, and often co-occurs on the coastal grazing marshes also favoured by Small-Red Eyed Damselflies and Ruddy Darter Damselflies. Like all Odonata it is an active predator, adult and nymph, largely taking small flies,  but not averse to dining on its distant relatives. At RSPB Old Hall, what I initially took to be a mating pair of Blue-Tailed Damselflies, turned out on closer inspection to be a Scarce Emerald feasting on the corpse of a Blue-Tailed Damselfly. In addition to an impressive display of predation, though I had no way of telling whether the Emerald had caught its prey on the wing or simply made a fortuitously (for the Emerald) timed landing, it represented a good chance to compare the blue bits of the two species. The steel blue pruinescence, a dusting of scales which fades with age, contrasted strongly with the almost luminescent looking blue tail-light of the commoner species.  Scan through the big crowds of Blue Tailed Damselflies for this big beast, and use your close-focus bins or a good photo to identify it by the pruinescence covering the whole of the first two segments of the abdomen, and the big, bent-paddle claspers at the back end to separate from male Lestes sponsa. A slightly different pattern of green and pale cream on the thorax separates the females of these species.  Look for them in June and July, I saw few of them after the big heatwave of 2022, for reasons unknown, perhaps it baked off the adults or desiccated any late developing nymphs.

Scarce Emerald (female) Essex 2022

Scarce Emerald (Male) Essex 2022

Historically, the commonest of the Lestidae in the British Isles, and still the one you’re most likely to encounter outside of South Eastern England, is Lestes sponsa, the Emerald Damselfly, you may hear it called the Common Emerald Damselfly.   This species has undergone something of a decline of late, like many of our odonata, as documented in the State of Britain’s Dragonflies report. It is hard to separate from L. dryas, I recommend a good book with the illustrations of Richard Lewington in it and a good pair of low-magnifying small binoculars for close focus, though any particularly small Lestes-with-blue-bits is likely to be one. Sadly I encountered just a few of this species during my summer transects.

Emerald Damselfly, Essex, 2022

The fourth species is the newest, and perhaps the slowest colonising, the beautiful and distinctive looking Southern Emerald Damselfly (Lestes barbarus). This is a gorgeous, key lime pie of an insect, with its dark green metallic upper surfaces contrasting with the pale, green-tinged yellow of its undersides, boasting a unique and instantly recognisable (yes, really) bicolour pterostigma, half milk white, half blackish brown. It has distinct ‘antehumeral stripes,’ look for markings like braces on its thorax. Its stronghold is on Canvey Island, of all places, I am advised a particular ditch is a good place to look, but I found it on the site near Basildon, where it was a new record. More delicate looking than the other three, it was first recorded in Britain in 2002, in Norfolk, and it’s been gradually colonising low-lying Essex since being discovered at Wat Tyler Country Park by Neil Phillips in July 2010, with other early records coming from Gunners Park, Shoeburyness in 2012. It is a more committed climate change rebel, and habitat specialist, than even the Willow Emerald, relying on ditches drying up in late summer for oviposition. I could scarce believe my eyes when I found one near Basildon on an EWT reserve. These species are moving so fast and unpredictably with their quiet invasion that they are one group in which the observations of keen eyed amateur naturalists and local surveyors can make real changes to known distribution maps.

Southern Emerald Damselfly, EWT site, Essex. 

So think of them on these winter days, and dream of them shimmering beneath a warm summer sky. Their season will roll around soon enough. Get yourself a good dragonfly book, a good pair of bins, and, come June, go to your favourite wetlands. You may just find yourself a new favourite insect there.

Southern Emerald Damselfly

*This blog has been edited since posting to correct the timeline of Southern Emerald colonisation and credit the finder. 

Birds Before Breakfast at Cranham Marsh

I see no need to blog in chronological order, so in between Holiday Blogs I'm going to post this, about a lovely morning joining a walk organised by my local Essex Wildlife Trust group.

Cranham Marsh is a small patch of land, managed for the benefit of wildlife by Essex Wildlife Trust, bounded by monocultures of oilseed rape and other crop plants, and the small conurbation of Upminster. In spring its ancient woodland, historic reedbeds, scrub and wet meadow rings to the sound of birdsong and the hum of bumblebees. It is a patch I do not blog about nearly enough, and wonderfully local. On the 5^th of May the site hosted its annual “Birds Before Breakfast” walk, led by its inimitable warden, local author and EWT conservation stalwart Tony Gunton, and my Mother and I were up early to attend. We somehow arrived between the two crowds who take the walk, and while the site seemed initially quiet for birds, the view across the wide fields of yellow brassicas toward the Church of All Saints was pleasing in the early morning light.

View of All Saint's Church, Cranham.

We eventually joined a group of about 20 people, curious local people and experienced birders, and walked onto the reserve. A few Swallows pursued insects over the hedge tops, against a blue sky.  My first UK Swifts of the year also wheeled about, and Orange Tip butterflies fluttered amongst the Red Campion flowers.  Common woodland birds, including Dunnock and Blackbird were singing loudly and conspicuously, and the distinct two note song of Chiffchaffs could also be heard, amongst the burgeoning trees.  Little charms of goldfinch fluttered through the hedge tops. Tony led us to a spot where we were able to watch a pair of whitethroats a little warbler and summer visitor from Subsaharan Africa, going back and forth feeding their young. Cranham Marsh seems to host large numbers of these charming little migrants, and their song, sometimes described as scratchy, and rather thinner perhaps than the song of some other warblers, is an evocative sound of the place.  Part of the reserve had been closed off as conservation grazing cattle worked their magic, controlling scrub and helping to restore the historic wet meadows. Mumsy heard a cuckoo, although neither of us could see it, its distinctive call is unmistakeable.  I saw a local cuckoo in Hornchurch country park later that day.

Blackcaps were also in evidence, another charming warbler species, also largely a summer visitor to the site.  Jackdaws periodically made squawking flights from some of the tall, ancient woodland trees which border the meadows, and they were joined by the bright, noisy and exotic Rose Ringed Parakeets which have joined the breeding bird list for the site in recent years.  While distinct in flight, their bright green plumage makes them very well camouflaged in their treetop habitat, as no doubt their ancestors in India were. More conspicuous in the treetops was a handsome Stock Dove, a smart and oft-overlooked pigeon, resembling a well-scrubbed, more minimalist looking woodpigeon, to which it is closely related. This one sat on the bough of an ancient oak, not far from a pair of parrots.

Part of Cranham Marsh LNR

 We were, for a donation, treated to a cooked breakfast of egg sandwiches, and, for the more carnist-inclined, egg and bacon sandwiches, prepared for us by the EWT local group’s volunteers.  People noted that attendance was down a little on previous years, which seemed a shame for what is so clearly a gem of an event, connecting people with the wildlife on their doorstep here on the outskirts of London. If you are in Upminster on the early May Bank Holiday, I heartily recommend birds before breakfast, it is well worth the early start.

Okay this wasn't taken at Cranham Marsh, but the other group's place down the road. Nevertheless, this is what it looked like.

As Mumsy and I were walking homeward, at what must still have only been about 10am, a small bird took off from the bridge, which crosses the stream, perhaps flushed by its approach. There was a flash of blue, and a distinctively shaped bird, with a stocky body and a long, sword-like beak, flew off across the meadow, presumably cutting out the streams meanders. Kingfishers breed locally at an RSPB reserve down near the river, and can even be seen in some urban parks, but this was a new one for me on my local patch, and what a bird, a stunner,  a Kingfisher!  I left with a healthy appreciation, renewed, of a local wildlife asset, and of the efforts of people like Tony Gunton and the other volunteers who do so much to preserve it and maximise its wildlife value.

The Voles of Roding Valley

I want to share a couple of photos I took during my volunteering recently at Roding Valley Meadows. Roding Valley Meadows is a multiple SSSI reserve in Essex, not far from Epping Forest, and Chigwell, that bastion of Essex culture. It hosts floodplain meadows, a wetland, secondary woodland, a network of ancient hedgerows, and a very dedicated and hard working team of hands-on staff and volunteers. Occasionally I am privileged to join them on their regular work parties.  Kingfishers and Little Egrets are commonplace on the river Roding.  However, a week ago on Tuesday, the day that the sun came back and I saw my first Bumble Bee of the year, it was mainly covered in so many voles.

While we were building some fencing in advance of the arrival of the cattle which provide summer grazing on the open parts of the nature reserve, we accidentally disturbed some of the little furry mammals. It was with some surprise that rather than scattering, although they did run away initially, at least a couple of the voles returned to their grass cutting pile and the round holes in which they seemed to live. Noticing movement, I sat and watched for a little while, as a stubby, furry snout emerged from one of the vole holes. The tiny, round beast sat outside its hole for a moment, looking unperturbed, before finding a few blades of green grass growing from among the pile of cuttings, and beginning to munch on them.  If I moved too close with my camera lens, they would dart back into the hole, sausage-shaped blurs of vole hair, though not for too long. Eventually, my watching began to make them clearly unsettled, and one discovered the tactic of biting off a strip of long grass and retiring with it, into the vole hole. The tip of the grass, protruding, wobbled as the vole munched. I left them to it and got back to work.

 

As I wandered away at the end of a busy day fence building, passing the long hedges of white blackthorn, the first wild blossom of the Spring, I was aware of several voles moving in the leaf litter, seeing another, quite clearly between the blossom covered branches, munching something busily in the leaf litter. I’d heard a rustle and been looking for a small bird as the source of the sound.  A couple of paces on another darted into the long grass. Perhaps at a local scale they are having a good year, they are a species prone to strongly cyclical population dynamics. My observations were entirely unscientific, perhaps I was merely more tuned in to their presence than usual, or perhaps, I just saw a lot of voles that day.   But it struck me how seldom we actually see these creatures. The short tailed field vole is thought to be the only mammal in the British Isles to outnumber humans, yet I was at University before I noticed that I had seen one which wasn’t in a Longworth trap.  They live outside of our radar, though of course many mammals and birds of prey, including Barn Owls and Kestrels, are almost totally dependent on them as a source of food.  It also struck me that they are very beautiful.

Fingringhoe Wick in February

About a fortnight ago, I went with the Beautiful Bee Girl to the amusingly named Essex Wildlife Trust reserve at Fingringoe Wick, near Colchester.  We parked in the gravel car park beside the visitor’s centre.  We’d heard there was a bittern which had been seen in recent days from one of the hides overlooking the site’s main body of fresh water, a small lake just a stone’s throw from the centre.   I'd understood Bitterns were best seen in the afternoons, when they move between their feeding and their roosting sites, but the Bee Girl, who had yet to see a Bittern despite having spent a lot of her time raising money for them, wanted to check the hide first.  To my shame, I’d rather hoped to get out to the river Colne to look at the waders, and some grebes which had been seen in the channel.  Luckily, we decided to do it her way.  Armed with our coffees, we made our way through the late February drizzle to the hide. The bench was packed with birders and volunteers, eyes to their telescopes and binoculars.  The volunteer from the visitors’ centre talked us to the spot where the bird had, seconds before, begun to climb up on a tussock of reeds. Of course, it took a while to find the vertically striped, straw-coloured heron among the vertical, straw coloured Phragmites which lined the opposite shore. But find it we did, standing on its tussock. Through the scope we could see the dark lines running down its face, its’ long, grey beak. We could see its excellent camouflage, the camouflage which makes this scarce heron one of the trickiest birds to see in the country.  Centuries ago they were common, especially in the huge fens of East Anglia, but reedbeds are much scarcer now, and though individuals like this one can winter in relatively small sections, breeding pairs need large expanses of unbroken reeds. Efforts are underway to restore and create large reedbeds, projects such as Wicken 2100 and the Great Fen Project, both in Cambridgeshire, may see the species re-establish properly in South East England.  Staffordshire Wildlife Trust is raising money to buy Tucklesholme Quarry to help them establish there.  Have a google and give them some money. The Beautiful bee girl did, and the bitterns rewarded her with a sighting! 

I wouldn't normally trouble my blog with a record shot. But Bittern!

 There were a few other birds out on the lake, including Shovellers, again displaying, circling each other on the water, and a confiding little grebe swam close to the hide. Teal lurked among the reeds, resting, heads on wings, but all was pretty quiet and we decided to head down to the saltings and the Colne estuary.  We passed the boardwalk near to which I had seen one of my first Turtle Doves a few summers ago, which was underneath a pond swollen by the very wet winter.  The spring was in the air already though, and a few daffodils had begun to open in the wildlife garden beside the centre.

Later in the day, the flooded boardwalk. 

On our way to the saltings we came upon one of the scarcer habitats at Fingringhoe, the lichen and moss carpet that grows on the poor, very sandy soils beside some of the old military installations, which have fallen back to nature on the reserve.   These sandy heaths, fringed with Gorse and Brambles and Concrete, are rather lush. Amongst the green mosses grows the beautiful and intricately branching Cladonia lichens, the so-called reindeer moss.  These sensitive plants are found only on very nutrient poor , and often acid soils, often appearing where there is very little soil at all. Lichens dominate the vegetation of shingle apposition beaches like Blakeney Point and Dungeness. They are also found on windswept tundras. Natalie the bee girl was immediately photographing the beautiful micro-world found down in the moss and lichen carpet as the clouds parted and the sun burst out above us.

Lichen and Moss carpet.

<3

We stepped up to one of the benches overlooking the beautiful Colne Estuary. The water seemed to become curiously blue, as the sky cleared.  Skeins of the locally ubiquitous Brent Goose, something of an overlooked speciality of coastal Essex in winter, flew past, out toward the estuary. These dark geese fly in from Scandinavia and Siberia to spend the winter in the relative warmth of the Essex coast.  Across the stretch of water were a cluster of gleaming white birds, with the scope we could identify them as Avocets, the elegant black and white waders which are familiar from the RSPB logo, and an iconic conservation success here in Britain.  Some appeared to swim in the rising water, others waded on the mudflats. We had only been watching them for a moment when they took to the air, and departed downriver after the skeins of geese. A couple of oystercatchers were left behind.  A fishing boat, pursued by a flock of gulls, headed downriver too, and we scanned the flock for interesting species. Sometimes Kittywakes or Mediterranean Gulls can be seen flying behind the fishing boats, but we only saw the ubiquitous Black Headed Gulls, Herring Gulls and a few brown juveniles of various common species.

Passing shipping.

We headed down to a hide on the waters edge, where several Great Crested and Little Grebes could be seen out on the open water, and the bones of an old wooden boat protruded from the sand. Wigeon and Teal whistled on the banks, and a small party of curlew flew by.  An interesting looking grebe turned out to be a curiously grey, but nevertheless lovely Little Grebe.

Boat Bones.

We were aware that time was marching on so we headed back toward the centre, eventually finding a hide overlooking the scrape, a small body of water cut into the saltmarsh and fenced off from it. A section of fence appeared to have come down in the recent strong winds.  The hide turned out to be the best decision we ever made. The saltmarshes lay before us, full of Brent Geese, beautiful Lapwings, handsome, stately Curlews and busy Dunlins and Starlings. On the waters edge sat a handful of Golden Plovers, rather scarce, handsome birds which will soon be returning to their upland breeding grounds, which include the moors of Northern England.  The light was beginning to fade, and the saltmarsh was bathed in golden light, the trees beside the hide casting long shadows over it. A Barn Owl drifted silently past the windows, just a few metres away. A pair of handsome Red Breasted Merganser, one of the most stunning, elegantly punk looking ducks you will ever see, floated out on the water, toward the centre of the channel. They are locally uncommon, and the ragged green crest of the male sets them apart from other ducks. They are closely related to the handsome Goosander which is becoming so familiar in the North of England.  Not long after a dark shape, wings raised in a slight V shape drifted over the marsh. The grebes Every duck, gull and wading bird smaller than a curlew took to the sky,  which filled with the shapes of hundreds of Lapwing, Golden Plover, Oystercatcher, Teal and Widgeon, and echoed with their alarm calls. The Marsh Harrier, apparently uninterested, continued flying, flapping lazily Southwards and Eastwards.  A couple of Black Headed gulls made mobbing passes as the large raptor flew on.  

The Saltings.

The last species we added to our list was a handsome bullfinch, and, with the reserve gates apparently locked at five, we headed back to the centre. Natalie discussed lichens, and attempted to ID a couple of specimens with the centre volunteers while I watched Little Egrets and cormorants fly off into the sunset to roost. We left, reminded of why Fingringhoe, that beautiful spot on the Colne estuary, remains one of my favourite reserves in Essex.

oh yeah, linkies.

Bringing Bitterns back to Staffordshire!

http://www.justgiving.com/tucklesholme

And the reserve this blog is actually about, which I properly recommend, one of the most beautiful places in Essex.

http://www.essexwt.org.uk/reserves/fingringhoe-wick