I have a wildlife pond and every year there are a number of large dragonflies around. They lay their eggs in the pond and I usually see that the adults have emerged because the empty larva case is attached to the stems of water plants. There have been no frog or toad tadpoles survive for two years now.
Today at about 1.00 I watched a larva crawl up a stem and over a period of about half an hour it split and the adult started to emerge. On closer inspection there were five new adults hanging onto the old larva case. They stayed this way for a couple of hours whilst the wings expanded and then the four wings were opened fully. They twitched the wings a number of times and then suddenly took off like a helicopter. The whole process took about three and a half hours.
I had to move the last one to a place of safety. A female blackbird has learnt to inspect the pond plants very closely and look for the emerging adults (they are a good meal and I know it has eaten at least three). Whilst I was watched them expand their wings and picking blueberries at the same time the blackbird turned up and ignoring me (about 3-4 ft away) started to hunt for dragonflies.
I had to move the last one to fly because otherwise it would have become blackbird food. It flew away successfully and hopefully some will return to lay eggs again.
