One Of Our Dragonflies Is Missing...

...Well, several actually. Last year our little pond was alive with dragonflies, all performing the aerial dogfights much to our entertainment (and possibly theirs of course). This year, just as their numbers start to rise, they disappear. Then after a few days they come back, and start disappearing again - and so the cycle goes on. I'm no dragonfly expert, but I doubt they are going off on long weekends, indeed I suspect it's new ones appearing each time.

So out came our Miss Marple & Columbo outfits. We wanted to get to the bottom of this. Were we being visited by hordes of stealth-equipped bug collectors? Did we have have some kind of lake monster hiding in the reedbed - it would be a good visitor attraction after all. No, nothing of the sort. What we seem to have is a Hobby...

No, we aren't talking stamp collecters, but falcons. The Hobby is a sort of small Peregrine Falcon, just a bit bigger than a kestrel it seems (see the RSPB page here), and it has a taste for dragonflies. To see it in action was quite impressive - it swoops down to the targeted dragonfly, grabs it in its talons, and flies upwards again, transferring the victim to its mouth & eating it whilst doing so. The latin name for the Hobby is Falco subbuteo - and it is from this bird that the table football game got its name apparently. Now there's a useful fact.

So mystery solved, and do you know what? We are rather pleased to have a Hobby amongst us - now all we need is an Osprey for a full set (and that is not so impossible, they do pass through Herts we are told).