Are you ready to go oding?

Yes, in my mission to give you yet more words you can use in Scrabble, I give you ‘'oding'’. You might already have done it without realising it, for it means to go looking for dragonflies. Honest!

Ok, so it is a term that hasn'’t quite caught on in the UK yet, but it will if I have anything to do with it, and I certainly have been enjoying oding around my new garden. Apparently, that makes me an 'oder'.

In the past few weeks, one species has been particularly prominent – the Migrant Hawker,– and what a beauty it is. It is one of the biggies of the dragonfly world. When I say big, it is still only about 6cm long and weights about 0.5-0.75 grams, which means that about 15 would weigh the same as a pound coin.

Here is a female, perched on one of my bamboo canes:

And here is a male on an old apple tree.

I thought it would help to point out some of the features that make it a Migrant Hawker. So, from a to e:

a: Males have blue-tinged eyes

b: Migrant Hawkers have a short yellow bar on their 'shoulder' - it is called an 'anti-humeral stripe'.

c: The 'golf tee' shape just behind the wings is diagnostic.

d: The abdomen is then patterned with pairs of spots all the way to the end - blue spots on mainly black in the mature male, small yellow spots on brown in the female.

e: Migrant Hawkers have very long 'anal appendages'. You can tell male dragonflies from females by the appendages - males have three, females have two.

It is a dragonfly that your grandparents wouldn'’t have seen in their gardens because it was just a rare visitor to Britain until about 1940, but it has since spread and prospered, such that it has now just about made it into Scotland and Ireland.

Numbers here are boosted each year by influxes from the continent - isn'’t it amazing to think of these things migrating potentially hundreds of miles and crossing seas?

One of the things I really like about Migrant Hawkers is that you can sometimes see several in action together because, unlike many dragonflies, they tolerate each other.

My new garden already has two ponds and a stinking old swimming pool, but none are in a fit state for dragonflies to breed, so this is one of the things I intend to rectify this winter. My prediction is that I can increase the number of dragonflies and damselflies in my garden ten-fold - I'll let you know if my confidence is well placed in due course!

So, go on, while the Indian summer is still with us, there's plenty of time to be an oder!