A visitor to our garden

Dawn and I were chilling in the garden - just finished our lunch in the conservatory - when with a thud a large flying thing with wings darted in, made enough noise for Dawn to beat a retreat, bashed its head a little around the skylights of the conservatory and settled on a blind for a rest. I saw it was a dragonfly and was obviously confused as our conservatory is not a pond and our pond is only just over a metre square, not your typical resting place for a big monster.

We caught it in a jamjar so that we could photograph it and release it. A camera fetched, and as we took pictures it seemed quite happy to sit on the (much calmer) hand of Dawn. Neither of us are great dragonfly fanciers and so had no idea what it was. So onto Google.

I used the google images tool to upload a picture and identify our dragonfly

To use it go to the google homepage and look for images on the right hand side or just go directly to google images https://images.google.com/ The camera icon allows you to upload a picture from your device or camera and away you go. We have found this pretty succesful so far although not foolproof. It prefers images that have few other objects to confuse so plain backgrounds are a bonus. A couple of the pictures we took were confounded by Dawns finger.

Our search took us the the broad bodied chaser. It turns out that the one we had visit was a female.