And finally … successful breeding season for rare dragonfly

Rare dragonfly thrives after successful restoration of peatbogs - Cumbria Wildlife Trust

Drumburgh Moss Nature Reserve is seeing a dramatic rise in number of white-faced darters

A rare dragonfly looks set to have a very successful breeding season at Drumburgh Moss Nature Reserve. At the start of our survey season, we found that 328 dragonflies had already emerged. That’s half of the total from the whole of last year’s season.

The white-faced darter, a small, dark dragonfly with red or yellow markings and a distinctive white face, is currently only found at a handful of sites around England. We've introduced it to Drumburgh Moss Nature Reserve over five years since 2019 in collaboration with the British Dragonfly Society.

Jack Dryden, Assistant Reserves Officer North for Cumbria Wildlife Trust said: “This is a fantastic result – 328 is a really encouraging number for the first day of our monitoring season. For comparison, it’s over half of last year’s total count of 627, which was done over seven weeks of monitoring. The year before that, in 2022, there were 124, so it looks like numbers will continue to rise, which is brilliant news. I wasn’t suspecting such high numbers, as the larvae usually have two-year life cycles, and two years ago the weather was quite bad during their emergence. This can injure a lot of vulnerable emerging dragonflies, reducing the number that then go on to reproduce. But this year’s numbers suggest that they are clearly more resilient than we give them credit for!”