Dancing dragonflies...and gold

The butterflies and dragonflies here are spectacular.  They provide shocks of colour suddenly to light up the undergrowth (outer and inner) or hidden camouflaged shapes to find – and unlike other wildlife watching they are totally undemanding, danger-free.   

Whenever there is water hole maintenance or damn creation to do I find a spot in the shade and watch the dragonflies.  They seem to have preferred perches and are quite territorial about their chosen spot.  Then they do quite different things with their wings...see my photos.  Is this part of their display, an alluring dance for me or another?

I would love to attract experts to study them, both dragonflies and butterflies – but they are like gold dust...these specialists.  It is one thing to identify the bright and exotic but the subdued end of the spectrum is demanding. 

I am sure we have a particularly rich and potentially rare collection of dragonflies here.  So these photos are to tantalise you and .... my friend Steve, from the Natural History Museum, one of these gold dust specialist.

With its Portuguese colonial past and troubled recent history Mozambique, and particularly the north, has not had a tradition of collecting and research.  Today we sit within one of the global biodiversity hotspots and an extremely rare habitat, East African coastal forest.

 There is so much to observe, learn, record, disseminate and conserve while ‘development’ creeps on....  I must attract funds and then the right people...gold meets gold.