As a nature lover, you get used to wildlife turning tail and scarpering the second it catches a glimpse of you. So it’s refreshing to find the odd animal that’s just as keen as you are to get closer.

I’m standing on a shady path at Potteric Carr, watching a large dragonfly…and the dragonfly is definitely watching me.

Glinting green in the shafts of sunlight, it whizzes towards me like a helicopter on a mission, before veering off when it’s a metre or so from my face. Dragonflies have a knack of simply vanishing from view, and I lose it for a few seconds. But then it’s back, buzzing me with another flypast, and another, and another…

It’s a female Southern hawker – a species described by the British Dragonfly Society as a “very inquisitive dragonfly that will often come close.” 

After about ten minutes of aerial manoeuvres that bamboozle both me and my camera, it climbs higher and zooms off. Luckily, I’ve managed to photograph one of these restless fliers before in a less challenging pose – resting in a tree.

There’s something other-worldly about dragonflies – insects that spend most of their lives underwater as larvae, before eventually emerging briefly into the spotlight to zip around on summer days. Some can be breathtakingly beautiful, like the four-spotted chaser I saw at Potteric Carr a few years ago, with wings like stained glass windows and its body turned gold in the sunlight.

If you want to marvel at these goggle-eyed flying machines, this reserve near Doncaster is one of the best places in Yorkshire to do it: more than 20 different species have been recorded in its 200 hectares of wetland, ponds and woodland. 

My walk around Potteric Carr is warming up: as the sun breaks through the clouds, more dragonflies take to the wing. Most numerous are the ruddy darters. Much smaller than the spectacular – and nosy - Southern hawker, the males are a vivid blood-red, while the females are a more subdued ochre-yellow with black markings. 

There’s a good chance of seeing them on pretty much every patch of brambles growing alongside the footpath. I watch as one male tries to eject another from a disputed leaf, triggering a brief aerial duel.

I see a more harmonious coming-together too: a male and female locked in a mating embrace. The pair fly somewhat precariously together between plants, before settling on a green stalk.

As I peer among the tangles of vegetation, I spot little flashes of electric blue. They’re damselflies – dragonflies’ more unobtrusive cousins - smaller and more delicate, with a tendency to flutter, rather than whizz about.

But, like their more boisterous relatives, they’re voracious carnivores and formidable predators: I photograph a common blue damselfly and then, when I look more closely, discover that it’s munching on a tiny insect.

It’s a reminder of damselflies’ place in the food chain. Like dragonflies, they in turn provide food for other predators – particularly birds. I’m worried that, if nature gets out of kilter, the effects will be felt far beyond one individual species.

Potteric Carr is undoubtedly a hotspot for dragonflies and damselflies, but is it in danger of becoming too hot, and – especially – too dry?

Like the rest of Yorkshire, the reserve has seen a summer of soaring temperatures and low rainfall. As I walk around, the evidence is plain to see: scorched vegetation, cracked footpaths and dried-out ponds.

Dragonflies need to bask in the sun to help power their flights – but they also depend on water for their survival: they lay their eggs in or near it, and their larvae live in it and catch food in it.

It’s Potteric Carr’s wetland environment that makes it such a special place for these charismatic insects – and wetlands are under serious threat from climate change. A report last year by the Wildlife Trusts warned that drought and heat extremes had caused important wildlife habitats, such as woodlands and wetlands, to dry out completely on some Yorkshire nature reserves. 

Despite its parched state, Potteric Carr, thankfully, still has some vital sources of water, fed by Mother Drain – the waterway that runs through the reserve. 

I’m standing on a bridge over the drain – just about to head back to my car - when I come across the final find of my day.

It’s one of the most beautiful species of damselfly – a banded demoiselle, resplendent in metallic blue-green as it perches on a stalk. 

Unlike the inquisitive Southern hawker earlier in the day, it’s got no interest in doing a spot of people watching. I only have a few seconds to admire it, then it’s off, lost among the dense leaves of a hawthorn tree.