by Steve Preddy, with photography by Gavin Vella

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the Gwent Levels over the last three years, recording dragonflies for the Monmouthshire Odonata atlas project. I was due to travel to Derbyshire with a friend for a motorcycling weekend on 15 August 2025, but had a couple of hours to kill, as we were not due to leave until later that afternoon, and so I headed to the area south of Magor with the intention of filling in a few gaps on the maps for some of the more common late-summer species. Mill Reen, which runs from Magor village to the Severn estuary seemed like a good place to try, and after exploring the stretch north of Pill Farm, I walked along the lane which leads south towards the estuary. Small Red-eyed Damselfly (Erythromma viridulum) was the highlight: a new site for this species.

As I was preparing to move on to check another stretch of the reen, a lestid flew up from the reen onto overhanging dead vegetation. It immediately struck me as being narrow-bodied, and very dark, lacking the pale blue areas found on a male Common Emerald (Lestes sponsa) or the brown areas found on a female, and through binoculars I could see pale-looking pterostigmata. Unfortunately, it then flew again, and I lost sight of it. I waited in the hope that it would re-appear, but without any success, and with time running out, I posted a noncommittal message to the South Wales Dragonflies WhatsApp group to encourage others to check the site out while I was away, and started to make my way back to my parked car. At the point where the track diverges from the reen, there is a weeping willow tree and so I made one final hopeful scan with the binoculars. There was a second lestid, closer than the first one was, and it too looked like a very good candidate for a Willow Emerald (Chalcolestes viridis). A few more minutes of watching (interspersed with checking the British Dragonfly Society website to double-check the identification features) and I was convinced: it also had pale pterosigmata, showed a spur-shaped marking on the side of the thorax that looked correct for Willow Emerald, and the anal appendages looked good for this species too. Unless there was some unusual variant of Common Emerald that could look like this, I’d found the first Willow Emeralds for Monmouthshire, and it turned out, for Wales, provided that there are no previous records that had not yet come to light.

Frustratingly, I heard no further news while I was away, but made it back to the site late on Sunday afternoon, this time armed with a telescope. Within minutes I found a male Willow Emerald, on the weeping willow. I called Gavin Vella, who I knew would be keen to photograph the damselfly, and hoped it would stay put. Gavin arrived with Jodie Roberts about half an hour later, and the photograph above was taken by Gavin that afternoon, just before the sun dropped below the hedge on the other side of the track, and the Willow Emerald disappeared.

Willow Emerald has been expanding its range westwards through England at a fast rate over the past few years, and by 2024 was in multiple locations on the other side of the Severn estuary, so it was only a matter of time before it reached us. The discovery at Mill reen marked the start of an astonishing run of sightings across the eastern Gwent Levels during August and September. Paul Grennard soon found two on Monk’s Ditch, Goldcliff, and Lee Gregory visited that site to observe copulating pairs and to find that there were oviposition scars on the branches there. I found one about a kilometre from Mill reen, at Summerleaze, a week after the first sighting, and then another on a stretch of Monks Ditch north of Whitson in early September. David Minshall found some at Magor Marsh the same day. At the end of September Gavin Vella found four near Redwick, and I found a copulating pair to the northwest of Goldcliff village. Even more surprising, towards the end of August one visited Alan Underwood’s garden in Govilon, on the edge of the Bannau Brycheiniog national park. Ian Merrill, Leicestershire’s county recorder, has remarked that by the time recorders are observing good numbers of Willow Emeralds across multiple sites, searching for oviposition scars over the winter is likely to reveal them to be widespread throughout the surrounding area. Among the ovipostion scars found by Lee Gregory were some that dated from 2024 or even earlier, so Willow Emerald may already be far more well-established in the county than we realise.

Back to rarity accounts index
Back to Monmouthshire main page