Hello, dear faithful reader, you're probably wondering why Odometer is a bit light in the posting department now that Summer is here? Hmmm, me too. A fair bit has happened since my last brief Odometer post, back in November 2015, advertising a talk about the dragons and damsels of Orkney.
Sightings news, both in and outwith Orkney, has been reported on the main Imperfect and Tense blog, whilst the behind-the-scenes stuff hasn't had a mention at all.
In early Spring, I spent an eye-crossing day and night number crunching the local Odonata records from 1992 until 2015 to compile a flight period table and produce an article for the Orkney Field Club journal.
Shortly afterwards, I was honoured to be offered the opportunity to be the Field Club's dragonfly recorder, a post in which I hope to be able to continue the excellent work of my predecessors, Keith Fairclough and Dick Matson (who were responsible for collating the 1992 to 2015 records).
To try to tap into the digital age and the enthusiastic photographers who post on Facebook, I have also set up an Orkney dragonfly and damselfly Fb group, OrkOdo, to help with both community engagement and recording.
More recently, yesterday in actual fact, I lead a dragonfly walk for the Field Club on the island of Hoy, with the aim of showing as many species as possible to anyone who came along. The weather wasn't great, so there was only four of us (and two of those were Our Lass and I), but we had a grand time, seeing six of the eight breeding species for Orkney.
The flight period article has been slightly rejigged to have a wider, less Orkney-centric appeal, with the addition of a map, some habitat shots and an explanatory paragraph about Orkney in general. This has now been submitted to the British Dragonfly Society for possible inclusion in their journal.
So all in all, things have moved on a bit and I need to start thinking about a Winter project to make those dark nights fly by.
Meantime, sightings and trip reports will most likely appear over on I&T, but if I ever discover a 'new for Orkney' species, you will hear about it here first.
