After seeing quite a lot of dragonflies at some ponds/lakes near Mühlheim am Main (the actual place is called Naturschutzgebiet an den Steinbrüchen, and if you have GoogleEarth here is the location) I started to think it would be fun/interesting to see if I could find any dragonflies emerging. This normally happens during the night/very early in the morning so that the dragonfly gets a chance to finish the job before daylight, as it's very vulnerable. So, I decided to arrive pretty much at sun-rise (5:16am) - earlier than that and it would be too dark to take photos without a flash, as well as enhancing the chances of me falling in, or getting arrested!

Click to enlarge each picture. Numbers in brackets are times. Some images have a comment that should appear if you hover the mouse over the thumbnail.

The location - it looked really stunning!

Within a few minutes I find some old larval skins

Shortly after I find some larvae, though nothing happening yet...

Very impressive distraction.

Aha!!! A Darter dragonfly (A) emerging! These are in sequence (left to right, taken over a number of hours. Mostly it's very gradual progress, except for the step from image 2 to image 5, which happens in two stages (head lifts up and grabs, then the tail pulls free) in just a few seconds. I was so lucky to see it!

Whilst waiting for some action from "A" above, I walked along the pond and saw another Darter (B), same species.

After taking a few more pics of A I walked back to where I'd seen the larva photographed above. It (C) had made progress (Skimmer/Chaser).

There was another Skimmer/Chaser larva (D) very close to (C). This time I was ready for the swing up/tail out stage, and took a video clip of the second part.

I collected some exuviae so I could see if it was possible to identify them. Roy Woodward says "The three large ones are hawker type. The broken one on the left looks like an Emperor (very round head shape), but looks a little small in comparison to the other two which are Aeshna species (hexagonal head shapes), perhaps the broken one is a Lesser Emperor???? The Damselfly is not identifiable from the photo, the other exuviae are skimmer/ chaser types (the top left one in particular looks different from the others - they could all be different species!)".

I left at about 9:45am - all the emerging dragonflies I saw still had quite some time to go until their wings were really ready for flight. I haven't yet had time to try to identify these tenerals (they're definitely not all the same species, though I think A and B are). I saw various other things during the morning, including Downy Emerald and Emperor (I think) dragonflies and a red kite!