Early morning

and lazy dragonflies

Yesterday I joined an excursion in search for the only population of Dark Bluets (Coenagrion armatum) in the Netherlands. Inaccessible terrain and a fragile habitat make this species a little hard to find on your own. But this excursion takes you to the heart of the population and gives everybody a good chance of seeing this nice bluet.

There were two different excursions, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. I decided to join the morning one. Meaning I had to get up early, but also that it wouldn’t be too warm, so the damsels would not fly too much. This worked out very well. As soon as we got out of our boat, we saw many different species. In the grass just a few meters from the boat we found several Scarce and Four-spotted Chasers and some damselflies. A little further I saw my second Yellow-spotted Whiteface (the first was a year ago at the same excursion). Really nice of course, but we came here for a different reason. A little later I heard someone shout “armatum!”, so the first ones were found. Our choice of taking the first excursion paid off as in the beginning the bluets weren’t flying around too much, giving me the opportunity to take nice pictures and movies. Especially the first one was really cooperative. A little later the sun came out a little and it became really hard to find bluets that really were willing to pose. In total over 40 Dark Bluets were seen, I think I saw about 20.