ANOTHER LIFE: In the first two weeks of this memorably dry and sunny spring, dollops of frogspawn were stranded like gleaming jellyfish in the fast-evaporating garden pond, and it seemed a tadpole-friendly idea to refloat them now and then with an inflow from the garden hose, writes Michael Viney.
The insect world, however, is still in no hurry to change habits conditioned by millennia. A visiting red admiral, on March 12th, said something about this butterfly's new willingness to winter in Ireland, but did not, signal any general emergence of winged things. A peacock and a lesser tortoiseshell also made a first flight out from hibernation, but still the air remained notably still.
A few queen bumble bees emerged to nuzzle the golden banks of lesser celandine; an occasional hoverfly tried its luck for nectar at daffodil or dandelion. But with nights still cold, and day-length unfolding as usual, there was no discernible summoning of cold-blooded insects from their winter eggs or larval armour. The courting birds will still have to tailor their breeding times to available food supply.
By today, of course, the insect rush should be well under way, and it does seem that climate change is advancing the emergence dates of at least some of our invertebrate species. The large red damselfly, for example, is nearly always the first of the dragonfly family to spread its wings, and its appearance on a Co Antrim bog on April 6th last year was about a fortnight earlier than any previous record in Northern Ireland.
It was spotted by Robert Thompson, the north's superlative insect photographer. A big, glossy poster on the back of our loo door (the first to fill such an honoured position since Che Guevara days) shows a brilliant scarlet damselfly perched at a kingcup's yellow flowerbud. The beast is as long as my forearm, with eyes like big, crimson grapes, and every spine on its legs, every vein of its latticed wings is needle-sharp. This astonishing image serves, in this instance, to promote the final year of Dragonfly Ireland (about which more below), and as an example of Thompson's work it is sublime.
His new book Close-Up on Insects is firstly a guide for photographers, amateur and professional, but also presents a lavish gallery of exquisite insect portraits. When most photographers are going digital, shooting hand-held with 35 mm cameras and putting up with limits to enlargement, Thompson still does things the old-fashioned way. He shoots on high-definition 120 roll film, using slow speeds on a heavy tripod, and fine-focuses a battery of telephoto lenses (his rucksack weighs 12 kilos).
He is first of all a naturalist, wise to insect habits and alert to every nuance of movement. He will wait for hours for rain to stop or wind to fall, and stalks his target species with infinite stealth. Some are discovered only by a long-experienced eye - his photographs of "cryptic" moths, virtually invisible among lichens or leaves, are wonderful studies of camouflage. Caterpillars in jewel-bright colours or posing as twigs are revelations of an insect world of which we are scarcely aware. Nature photography, whether of insects or birds, needs all the skills of a hunter, and the spirit of an artist in composition and lighting. Thompson's book is one to set you off for life.
His own passion for dragonflies drew him in as co-ordinator for Dragonfly Ireland, the three-year island-wide survey of the insects, funded by both governments and now at the start of its final season. It has been a remarkably successful venture, based in the Ulster Museum, and has attracted the help of many amateurs as well as professional biologists.
Discovery of three new species early in the project owed a lot to the alertness of bird-watchers in the sunny south-eastern counties, looking for new targets for their telescopes in the ornithological doldrums of high summer. Searching the coastal marshes of Co Wexford and elsewhere, their glance was arrested by the glittering wings of the emperor butterfly, Anax imperator, and its lesser relative Anex parthenope.
Both these migrant dragonflies seem to have been encouraged by global warming to colonise our south-eastern corner, and the third new Irish species, the migrant hawker Aeshna mixta, has also been spreading north.
It took Thompson four hours at a small pond to get the picture of the brilliant blue emperor that appears in his book, and it will no doubt be a showpiece in the Irish dragonfly atlas due for publication in 2004.
Robert Thompson's e-mail address is rst1@bann8.fsnet.co.uk, and the Dragonfly Ireland website is www.habitas.org.uk
Close-up On Insects is available from Guild of Master Craftsman Publications at £26.95 plus £3.50 p&p. E-mail: pubs@thegmcgroup.com or credit-card hotline 01273-488 005.