Lovely little dragons...

Seaside Dragonlets, to be precise. (For once, the female of the species is more colorful!) 2013 has been a fantastic year for dragonflies, and the Avalon yard was swarming with these wee beauties (only a couple of inches long) at the end of July. They are the one odonate species that can handle salt water in its nymph stage...

"Obelisking" to keep cool (lowers the exposed surface area)...

Happy Halloween Pennant Summer Solstice!

No, I don't have my holidays mixed up. This Halloween Pennant was out hunting on the first day of Summer. I highly, highly recommend many visits to Cox Hall Creek Wildlife Management Area if you are/find yourself in Cape May County. A former golf course allowed to go to seed, with some active management thrown in; meadows, woods, freshwater ponds and everything that goes with them. Fabulous. Easy-walking paved trails, too. You can even take your bike. (Which I would, if I could wrestle it out of the depths of my shed and if the tires were still capable of holding air...)

Black and blue and...white?

Added a "new for me" dragonfly to the yard list (that I'm not actually keeping). Took me longer than it mayhap should have to find it in the book. For an obvious reason, I was looking for a dragonfly with a glaringly obvious white body...

But once I found the beastie, a Great Blue Skimmer, the description clinched the ID: "often tame, allowing a close approach as it perches on a shaded twig." *

As you can see, this youngster (the white will become less obvious as it ages, changing over to a pale blue) had no problem posing for his portrait. Sometimes behavior is your best key to pinning a name on a beastie.

* Dragonflies through Binoculars, Dunkle.

Wordless Wednesday.

Yeah, I know. It's Thursday.

(And this is a Blue Dasher.)

Day-glo dragon.

Actually, she's matured a bit from when I first saw her. She's not nearly so loud as she was; you can see that the dots and dashes along her tail are no longer bright lime but are shading into turquoise...

This is a female Eastern Pondhawk; the males are actually a light powder blue all over. I'll say it again: dang confusing dragonflies. Good thing they are so wonderful to look at.

Difficult Dragons.

Yeah, you kind of think they would be…

A male Seaside Dragonlet (see what I mean about fantastic names?), an older one as the dusty bloom along his tail attests. [Hmm, I must remember to ask about those tick-like bumps along his back…]

A female of the same.

And another, younger, female Seaside Dragonlet.

Confusing, confusing, confusing! Many of the seaside dragonlets flitting around a local little pond appear solidly black. One of our expat Brits, who knows more about our flora and fauna than just about any local expert and generously shares it with us, tells me that any combination of black and orange (all black; all orange; black body, orange-spotted tail; orange-striped body, black tail) can be found on this particular little dragonfly.

Add in the fact that these things hardly ever sit still and you should not be surprised that a person must be more than a bit obsessive-compulsive to key them out. And have fun doing it. I am thrilled to find that I am not so obsessed. (Although I have to wonder if that is only because I'm inherently lazy and have someone like Mike around to happily do it for me…)

My conclusions after my recent mini-lessons in dragonfly id and morphology? It's much easier to tell males from females than species from species--you just look at the naughty bits. (Odonata porn. *sigh*) And beginners should not attempt either without a digital camera. 

Naturalists are indeed very odd folk… We love chasing dragons.