Odonata and Cuckoos

I read somewhere recently that dragonfly and damselfly larvae like to use Water Soldier plants to live in and emerge from, so invested in three plants for my small garden pond a couple of weeks ago.It looks to be working!

                                 Damselfly larvae on Water Soldier Plants. Click to enlarge.  

Dragonfly larvae are rather ugly creatures that spend up to two years feeding at the bottom of ponds, and then in the summer months crawl up the leaves or stems of water plants where the outer skin spits open for a rather damp insect to emerge.  This will eventually expand and dry out for the beautiful adult insect to take flight. So far I have had several Large Red and numerous Azure damselflies. Not sure yet what the above larvae are but am waiting patiently with camera at the ready.

The Beautiful Demoiselle has appeared again in the stream down the Weymouth road

My newly adopted Cuckoo, Nussey, was the first of this years tagged Cuckoos to leave the country. How on earth does it know the way to Africa?  After spending time in France feeding up for the journey it flew south through Spain, crossing the Mediterranean into Morocco. It presumably intended doing a bit more feeding before crossing the Sahara, but seems to have decided that it would be better off in Spain and so has made the highly unusual move of  flying 780 miles back north and is now in northern Spain near the French border.