Sleeping dragon

Daylight hours are steadily dwindling. By the autumn equinox, which this year falls on 23 September, day and night will be roughly equal. For a sunloving insect like the black darter, one of our last dragonflies to emerge, this has profound implications.

Not only is the black darter on the wing until well into autumn, but its British distribution is skewed to the cooler, damper north and west due to its preference for shallow peaty pools on moors and bogs. So this small, stocky dragonfly often has to contend with unfavourable weather. The male’s unusually dark coloration serves a vital function: it helps the insect to warm up fast whenever the clouds part.

At night, the black darter rests among reeds or sedges. Photographer Andrew Fusek Peters dreamed of taking a picture of one roosting under a starry sky, but it took “two years of searching” before he finally struck lucky and found a roost site beside a boggy pool on the National Trust’s Long Mynd reserve in Shropshire.

Just after moonset at midnight, Andrew took one exposure to highlight the perched dragonfly, then combined it with a second exposure to capture the magnificence of the Milky Way.

FIND OUT MORE

Discover more about dragonflies and damselflies at: british-dragonflies.org.uk