Posts in Category: Odonata
Thornbush Dasher: Estero Llano Grande TX
I was going through odonata withdrawal in Maine during November, so it was a pleasure to go the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas where the dragons and damsels were still flying. This was literally my first dragon of the trip. I was hoping it was a new species for me…but I photographed it last year in the Valley as well. It is a Thornbush Dasher, somewhat loosely related the to the common Blue Dasher found in New England and country wide (except for the Rocky Mountains)…but the Thornbush is restricted to Texas. I really like the bokeh on this shot!
Here is a Blue Dasher for comparison, taken only a moment later and a few steps further on.
Though they are very similar in superficial look, and share a “name”, a good back view or top view of the Thornbush shows it is not same kind of bug at all. Note the flare in the tail. Note too how the angle of the light turns the eyes in last photo a very Blue Dasher green. 🙂
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1) 2) and 3) 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 320 and 800. 4) 1200mm equivalent. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Roseate Skimmer, Quinta Mazatlan
Between a week in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas for the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival and a week in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico for the Festival of the Cranes at Bosque del Apache, I have added over 1000 images to weiw.lightshedder.com. So, expect some catch up over the next few weeks as we move through Thanksgiving and into a few weeks in the home and Virginia offices. 🙂
This is a Roseate Skimmer, on of my favorite Dragonflies, from the grounds of Quinta Mazatlan in McAllen Texas. This, like many of the odonata I saw in the Valley, is a very worn bug…possibly a migrant from further north. There are winter texans…I suppose there are winter texan odonata.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 640. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Texas Black Saddlebags
Actually this might not be a resident Texas Black-saddlebags. BSBs are long distance migrants and this specimen looks well worn. It could conceivably even be one of the BSBs I saw emerge at my pond in Maine earlier this summer. Wouldn’t that be strange and wonderful.
The BSB is the single most abundant dragonfly I am seeing on this trip to Texas…even Wandering Glider is a distant second. There are BSBs everywhere I have been in the past 5 days, and in large numbers. Impressive.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Red-saddlebags At Last!
I have photographed Black Saddlebags in both Texas and Maine, and I have one really bad photo of a Carolina Saddlebags from my Kennebunk dragon pond this summer, but my ambition for this trip to south Texas and New Mexico was to find and photograph a Red Saddlebags. They don’t get as far north as Maine and a friend who posted a pic from NM said the last record for the upper Rio Grande Valley is sometime in September, so my only real hope was Texas.
My first day in Harlingen I got out to Estero Llano Grande World Birding Center…which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite places for birding, bugging, and photography…and, sure enough, there were a smattering of Red Saddlebags among the abundant Blacks. I had, however, about given up on getting one to sit still for a photo when I found a little reed tip out by Grebe Marsh where one was returning with fair frequency. I watched it for fifteen minutes, missing it every time…it was in touch-and-go mode…but I made note of the location to check on my way back to the visitor center.
And there it was, on my way back, on the same reed tip…and this time it sat while I got a few shots, and then returned twice to the same perch for more shots at different angles. I was so blessed!
The perch was high, above eye-level, so the angle is not great…but still…a Red Saddlebags!
It, like the Blacks it was flying with, was a well worn bug…likely a migrant from further north mating one last time on its final journey south. (Some of the Blacks were tattered enough for me to believe I might have photographed the same bug a few months ago in Maine.)
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Blue-eyed Darner: Seattle WA
There were a lot of these Blue-eyed Darners in the Urban Bay Natural Area in Seattle. They were in the air along the edge of Lake Washington, and even more present weaving among the cattails in the lagoon on the other side of “the fill” (as the locals apparently call the reclaimed dump area). I came really close to getting a shot of one in the air…but eventually this specimen settled for a series of photos. It was well worn with tattered wings, but still beautiful with its turquoise eyes and pattern of abdomen spots. This dragonfly really does look like something crafted in a Southwestern Jewelry shop.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1) 2400mm equivalent field of view (1200mm optical zoom plus 2x digital tel-converter function). f6.5 @ 1/200th @ ISO 100. 2) 1200mm equivalent. f6.5 @ 1/320 @ ISO 125. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Black Saddlebags, Kennebunk Bridle Path
I mentioned in yesterday’s post, that I had been seriously distracted from the Monarch migration along the Kennebunk Bridle Path on Sunday by a trio of Black Saddlebags hunting just where the trail opens out to the marsh from the tunnel of trees next to Rt 9. The trail is narrow there, running between dense shoulder high hedges of mostly Beach Rose (with some stunted saplings and a lot of wild aster and Goldenrod mixed in this season).
We had a lot of Black Saddlebags emerge at the pond I frequent for dragons and damsels this summer. There were generally at least 2 flying on any given day, and often half a dozen. I was more than a little frustrated with them as they stay in the air for hours (sometimes it seems like days) at a time, never perching for a photo. I did eventually find a teneral (newly emerged from its last larva stage) and track it in its first weak flight to the perch were it hoped to dry, and got a few shots, mostly obscured by the reeds around it. But I still wanted a good shot of a Black Saddlebags. I mean…so many…so close!…and no photo??? That can’t be.
I am discovering, however, that Saddlebag behavior is quite different in the fall than it is in the summer…or maybe it is different among migrant Saddlebags and resident Saddlebags. The Saddlebags I am seeing these days spend at least part of their day perched, mostly low in rough vegetation, where they can find a bare vertical twig to latch onto, and as someone in the Northeast Odonata Group on Facebook told me already, they tend to return to the same perch (or one close by) after each hunting flight. I remembered this after startling a Saddlebags into the air at exactly the same spot on the trail for the third time. 🙂
So I sent about 90 minutes figuring out which twigs they were using, and waiting for one to return. Eventually one did…and landed dead head on to me. The best I could do was a face shot, and even then, partially obscured by the grasses between.
The afternoon was wearing on, as they say, and I was getting tired of walking and standing along the same little stretch of trail, so I decided to cross Rt 9 and take my scooter up to the marsh pools on the other side. There is a stretch of Beach Rose and taller saplings forming a hedge on either side of the trail just beyond the pools where I found so many dragons early this summer, and I had, in early July, seen and photographed a Saddlebags well above my head in a tree there. Certainly it was worth a try.
I was really, really thankful to find a Black Saddlebags right were I went to look. This one, as you see from the first photo, was perched side on to me, just below eyelevel, in on a dry flower head near the top of the Beach Rose hedge. It was deep enough in the hedge so I could not get around behind it…but I am more than satisfied with this view. And, it sat there as long as I could want. I left it on its perch when I finally decided it was time to get on my scooter and go home.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 840mm –1680mm equivalents. f5.8 @ 1/250th – 1/320th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
So I have, I think, my Black Saddlebags pics for this year. Not that I will stop looking, of course, but if don’t get another, these are enough to satisfy me. 🙂
Christmas in September, take 2. Meadowhawks
Last Monday I posted an image of a Green Darner Dragonfly mating wheel in a Blue Spruce tree, under the Christmas in September heading. This is even more Christmassy. It is a mating pair of either White-faced, Cherry-faced, or Ruby Meadowhawks. These three, with bright red males, are all here right now and all so similar that I can not tell from the photo, and I did not see the pair from any other angle. You need to see the face, and even then, it is a chancy thing. We also have the Autumn Meadowhawk right now, in great abundance, which is another one easily confused with this trio, but the Autumn would show lighter colored legs. Close as I can get.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1240mm equivalent field of view. f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought: I am rapidly coming to the end of dragonfly season. The last Odonata fly in Maine in October. Already the pond, which was alive with dragons and damsels a few weeks ago, is very quiet. You have mating Meadowhawks and Bluets in some numbers, a few Common Darners still flying on warm afternoons, and a solitary Black Saddlebags. There is only one pair of Pondhawks still there, and all the Blue Dashers are gone. I expect one day soon to find the pond and the air above it empty, at least of Odonata.
And, since dragon and damselfly hunting has been such a big part of my summer, both personally and photographically, I am faced with more than the usual fall “what next?” Oh, I know, we will have foliage in a few weeks, and just yesterday my daughter was remarking that the “September skies” are back. By the end of September my travel schedule kicks in, with trips to Oregon, New Jersey, Texas, and New Mexico before Thanksgiving. So I will be busy, and there will be lots to photograph. (And dragon and damselflies still flying in the southern reaches of the journey!)
Still, today, I am caught with that “seasons passing too quickly” feeling. My soul is singing “Where have all the dragons and damsels of summer gone?” The wheel of time is threatening to run me over.
And I was thinking about time and eternity in another context this week, thinking that too often we think of eternity as an “unimaginable and unending stretch of time” when in fact, eternity is the absence of time altogether. Time and eternity are two alternate views of reality, and they exist side by side, or, better, intertwined…not as we picture them, one after the other, sequentially. Especially NOT “time while we live, and eternity after we die.” And every religion worth the name has offered some way out…some way to transform the temporal view to the eternal. The temporal is, well, temporary at best, and often seen as illusion. Only the eternal is divine. Every religion values eternity and devalues time.
Strange that.
Because, of course, rightly seen, time is just the way we humans experience eternity. We see the passing seasons, and we know, especially as we age, that we have a limited number of them. We see people born and we see people die. Here and not here. And because of that we begin to count the moments…to see each moment as one more or one less, rather than as the moving point, the living point, where we touch eternity…the moving point, the living point, where eternity touches the world of matter in each of us. The only true way out is to learn to see the eternal in every moment, to be the eternal in every moment…to live in time as though there were no time.
Now don’t think I am devaluing time here again. What I mean is that we should each bring the full rich living experience of eternity to bear on every passing moment, so that every moment becomes as valuable to us as all eternity. I mean that we, each of us, should become the moving, the living, point were the eternal divine touches the world.
Seasons come and seasons go. The dragons and damsels of this year are almost gone. And the question is not really “what’s next?” It is always “what’s now?”…an eternity of what’s now…a now that is eternal.
And in saying it, I can almost grasp it. I can almost see it, taste it, feel it. It is almost my reality. And maybe that is as close as we can get…the rest…in this as in everything…must be faith.
A moment filled with meadowhawks in a Blue Spruce tree is, by faith, eternal.
Christmas in September: Common Green Darner
I was chasing one of the mosaic darners round and round the little pond where I do a lot of dragon and damselfly hunting, without success as the critter would not settle long enough for me to get on it with the camera, when this pair of Common Green Darners popped up to the ornamental Blue Spruce right in front of me, and right at eye-level. The late September afternoon sun was almost horizontal, picking out every detail and bringing out all the color of the pair. The tree was also right on the close edge of a little bay in the pond, which, though it limited my angle of approach, also put the background, across the bay, well out of focus. Perfect. These are such big dragons that I could easily fill the frame at 840mm equivalent, full optical zoom, without resorting to the digital tel-converter. Even better!
It was one of the members of the Northeastern Odonata group who saw the Christmas ornament connection when I posted it over there. So. Christmas in September. And that is appropriated in more ways than one, as a perched pair of Common Green Darners at eye-level in good light has to be considered a gift by any dragon fancier!
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 840mm equivalent field of view. f5.8 @ 1/500th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Canada Darner, Old Falls Pond, W. Kennebunk ME
The other day I detailed the Black-shouldered Spinylegs I found when I went to Old Falls Pond on the Mousam River looking for American Ruby-spots. The BsSl was not the only interesting Dragonfly I found. This Canada Darner, one of the large Mosaic Darners, was hung up on a small tree on my second visit to the marsh where the trail down from the road meets the pond. As it happens, this is my second encounter with a Canada. The first was a female depositing eggs at Factory Pasture Pond in mid July.
These are big, bright Dragons…the kind that can make Odonata watchers of almost anyone.
The side shot here is for identification purposes. The Mosaic Darners can be, mostly, identified on the basis of the stripes along the side of a thorax.
And this is pretty much ideal Canada Darner habitat. Old Falls Pond.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1240mm equivalent field of view for the Dragons…840mm optical plus 1.5x digital tel-converter (except the female at 1680mm). The pond at 24mm. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Black-shouldered Spinylegs at Old Falls Pond: Happy Sunday!
With my new interest in Odonata (dragon and damselflies), I am beginning to look at the landscape of Southern Maine in a different way. I know where most of the good “classic” photo ops are, and I know, pretty much, where to go for most of the birds that either live here or pass through. But I am only learning where to go for dragons and damsels.
This is the season when the American Red-spot flies…and I really want to see one. American Ruby-spot is a close relative of the Ebony Jewelwing, a broad-winged damselfly, which I featured recently, but it has clear wings with bright “ruby” spots close in to the body.
Unfortunately it is not listed on Odonata Central as occurring in York county, nor is it featured in range maps covering the county in the USGS data base of Odonata, and notes I have read elsewhere place American Ruby-spot in Maine but not on the coastal plain. I live on the coastal plain. Still, there are places in York county that have the kind of “clean” swift running rivers with lots of exposed rocks that the American Ruby-spot likes. (I am confident of all of the above but the “clean” part.) So it is worth looking.
The nearest likely spot is about 10 miles inland, on a little stretch of the Mousam between Estes Lake and Old Falls Pond. The Mousam tumbles down over rock ledges and through boulders for a quarter mile or so, all in a rush. It is one of my favorite places for fall foliage, with the overhanging maples and the white water of the falls and rapids.
But now, with my new Odonata eyes, I have to look at it as possible American Ruby-spot habitat as well! Like I say, a whole new layer to the landscape.
Unfortunately the American Ruby-spot does not seem to see this little stretch of the Mousam the same way I do. There were none.
Not that it was not a worthwhile trip. The view and the music of the falling waters would be enough, but I found Palm Warblers, a tiny Northern Leopard Frog, an even smaller Toad, and several new or seldom seen dragons and damsels. The lead image is, as you might have guessed from the title, a Black-shouldered Spinylegs. It is a member of a large family of dragons (Gomphidae) which all have more or less broad tips on their abdomens (tails)…clubtails, snaketails, spinylegs, etc. The Black-shouldered Spinyleg favors waters very similar to the American Ruby-spot, though it will tolerate slower moving “muddy” streams, and oxygen-rich ponds and lakes, where you would not find the damsel.
The full body shot shows off the broad tail.
I had a job identifying this dragon…made more difficult by the fact that Odonata Central does not list Black-shouldered Spinyleg for York County, Maine either, nor does the USGS data base. In fact I posted pics to the North-east Odonata Facebook group just to me sure of my id.
In researching for this piece this morning, however, I visited the Maine Dragon and Damselfly Survey site. Maine is one of only a few states to have such a comprehensive, scholarly survey of Odonata, conducted over several years by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. I have not used the site much, since it makes few (as in no) concessions to the amateur dragon and damselfly fancier. It uses only Scientific names, and cryptic codes for distribution. Still, with a bit of Googling Latin names and a bit of common sense on the codes, I found that the Black-shouldered Spinyleg is indeed recorded for York County Maine. It was not seen in the first round survey in the late 90s…but it was added a more recent 2006 follow-up. So there!
And for the Sunday thought: My own knowledge of dragon and damselflies is miniscule. I am humbled by every encounter with the folks who really know…which is most of the regular posters on the North-east Odonata Facebook group, the authors of the guides I use, and those who maintain the web-sites…to name a few. But I have to consider that even the experts admit to knowing very little, comparatively, about Odonata…compared, of course, to what there is to know…compared to what we have yet to learn. Odonata from an interesting, highly visible and certainly vital layer in the life-scape, and yet even the authorities are not sure if something as striking and identifiable as Black-shouldered Spinyleg lives in York County Maine (or at least not in agreement).
I love learning new stuff. I love discovering new bugs and new birds and new frogs and new ways of seeing the landscape in which I live. It makes me feel more alive to have found a Black-shouldered Spinyleg along the Mousam between Estes Lake and Old Falls Pond. And everything I learn brings me closer to the Creator of All Things. The love of learning, the love of discovery, is a vital aspect of the love the God. When we stop learning, when we stop discovering, then love is dead. This is a true of the love between people as it is of our love of creation. We have one eye…it is either open or closed. If I am not discovering a new way to look at the landscape around me, then it is likely I am not discovering new things to love about the people around me. That is death.
And that, this morning, hits me right in the face! That challenges me. That makes me wonder what I don’t know about the people around me…it makes me wonder if I am not seeing the Black-shouldered Spinylegs of their souls…of their spiritual landscapes?
One thing gives me hope. That same Maine Dragon and Damselfly Survey that lists the Black-shouldered Spinyleg for York County Maine, also lists the American Ruby-spot! That is enough to keep me checking likely spots in the landscape.
And this morning’s Sunday thought, is, I hope, a timely reminder to check the spiritual landscape of those around me to see what I am missing that I might love (and better love). That is what it means to be alive. And that is what it takes to keep love alive.