Posts in Category: dragonflies
Female Green Darner
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From the looks of things the flood of Green Darners coming south may be over. This is from last week, at Laudholm Farm, on a particularly busy Darner day. I was able to photograph both male and female Greens as they perched, though the specimens were more than a mile apart. That might give you an idea of the size of the swarm. At both locations, there were 10-15 Darners visible in the air at any given moment. That is a lot of Darners on any day. 🙂
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. ISO 100 @ 1/250th @ f6.3. Program with -1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Green Darner Invasion!
I have never seen as many Green Darners as I have this fall. For weeks now, on a good day, you can see hundreds (probably thousands if you stayed in the right spot long enough) coming through on their way south. They come in swarms. There will be a few Wandering Gliders mixed in, and the occasional Black-saddlebags, but mostly they are all Greens. They bring out what I assume are our resident Canada and Green-striped and Black-tipped Darners to do battle over their territories, but the Mosaic Darners could be migrating with them. Hard to tell. And hard to find one of the Greens perched. I did find one male and one female that sat long enough for photos on my last trip to Laudholm Farms. This is the male.
Sony HX400V at 1200mm and 2400mm equivalent field of view. ISO 250 @ 1/250th @ f6.3. Program with -1/3 EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet. Assembled in Pixlr Express (web version).
Slender Spreadwing
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The meadows at Emmons Preserve have been very good this summer and last for Odonata. Still a beginner, I have many first sightings and first photos from Emmons. I have, if memory serves, at least one other photograph of this species, but it is rare enough be just a little exciting when I get another. The total lack of pruinocity on the tip of the abdomen and its length and thinness make this almost certainly a Slender Spreadwing, and the light tips on the wings are good for that species too. 🙂
Sony HX400V at 2400mm equivalent field of view. ISO 160 @ 1/250th @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Green-striped Darner
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The business end of a Green-striped Darner. It has been an odd year for Odonata in Southern Maine. Common species have been uncommon…way down in numbers…and some of my best ponds have been particularly unproductive. At the same time, there have been lots of Green-striped Darners, a species that I had not seen here before this summer…though they are definitely here every year…I had just missed them. You could not miss them this year. 🙂 And there have been swarms of Green Darners over the past few weeks. I assume they are migrating down the coast, but yesterday, for instance, over the marsh ponds along the lower Mousam, there were hundreds of Darners…15 and 20 in the air at any moment.
This Green-stripe is at Day Brook Pond on the Kennebunk Plains, and is my first ever perched GSD. It sat very patiently on this White-birch log while I worked all around it, balancing on beaver clipped saplings over saturated moss at the pond’s edge to get the right angles. This is an actual macro shot (as opposed to a tel-macro), taken quite close in at about 66mm equivalent field of view. ISO 80 @ 1/125th @ f6.3. I used program shift to dial the aperture down to f6.3 for greater depth of field. Sony HX400V.
Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
The spider and the dragon
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When I went out yesterday to mow the front yard, there were a dozen or more tiny, late-season, dark-legged, off-colored Meadowhawks flying low and perching often. Most likely they were female or immature male White-faced Meadowhawks, but I can not be at all certain. As I was photographing this one close in under the eves of the house, it flew up and right into a spider web. I considered freeing it, but then the spider, which had been hiding under the lower edge of the siding on the house, scuttled out and attacked. So be it. Spiders got to do what spiders got to do. And I am almost as fond of spiders as I am of dragonflies. I think this is just one of the grass spiders…a funnel weaver of some kind, though the web seemed sticky enough at least to trap the dragon…or else its legs just got so well tangled that despite best efforts it could not free itself. An hour later the spider had worked the dragon almost completely up under the siding on the house. For scale here, the dragonfly is maybe an inch and a quarter long (3 cm) and I was shooting from about that same distance.
Sony HX400V. 68mm equivalent field of view, macro. ISO 200 @ 1/80th @ f3.5. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Any perch
My wife and I spent the better part of the day at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Maine yesterday. It is something we have done several times now on or around our anniversary. The CMBG is a treasure, the unlikely result of the ongoing efforts of a group of dedicated people in Boothbay. They have assembled a world class collection of plants in beautifully landscaped settings that always provides a day of pleasure when we visit. We were a few weeks later this year than in past visits and it was interesting to see the difference that few weeks made in what was blooming, and what was not.
A highlight of this trip was the number of insects. There were bees, mostly Bumble, everywhere, and squadrons of Twelve-spotted Skimmer Dragonflies. crickets. Wasps. Several other Odonata. Etc. It sometimes seemed difficult to photograph flowers without catching a bug in the frame. 🙂
This image is, of course, an unusual juxtaposition. Dragonflies, like the Blue Dasher here, are predators and do not generally visit flowers. That is not to say they will not settle on one if it presents itself as a likely perch for hunting. This stand of salmon colored Day Lilies was along the bank above an ornamental pond where many dragonflies were patrolling. And the Blue Dasher is not the only dragon I caught perched among the blooms.
Olympus OM-D E-M10 with 75-300mm zoom. 380mm equivalent. Shutter preferred. 1/500th @ ISO 320 @ f8. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet.
Calico in Obelisk Posture
Well, almost in full Obelisk posture…but then this is Maine, and even in mid-summer, the sun is never straight up. The theory, with some lababoritory testing to back it, is that pointing the abdomen at the sun like an Obelisk and raising the wings helps to avoid overheating on hot days by limiting exposure to the direct rays of the sun. The behavior has been observed in most dragonflies that hunt from a perch. This a a little Calico Pennant which I found out on the shores of Kennebunk Plains Pond on our hottest day so far. Note that in this position the dark patches on the Calico’s wings also provide shade for the thorax.
Olympus OM-D E-M10 with 75-300mm zoom. 600mm equivalent. Shutter preferred. 1/500th @ ISO 250 @ f7.1. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet.
Racket-tailed Emerald
Now here is a creature for you. Talk about wildlife! This is wild. Or that is what I think. 🙂
I have only ever seen the Racket-tailed Emerald in one small pool on the land-ward side of the Kennebunk Bridle Path, maybe a mile inland from the mouth of Mousam River, but I see at least a few there every June/July. They are pretty steady fliers, constantly patrolling the pool, but they do occasionally perch. Last Saturday was a good day to catch one perched.
Olympus OM-D E-M10 with 75-300mm zoom. 600mm equivalent. Shutter preferred. 1/640th @ ISO 800 @ f7.1. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet. Cropped for scale.
Female Widow Skimmer
It is Widow Skimmer season out by Old Falls on the Mousam. The females are always first, and when they emerge they are very present, especially here in the brush above the stream.
Olympus OM-D E-M10 with 75-300mm zoom. 1200mm equivalent (600 optical plus digital tel-extenter). Shutter preferred @ 1/640th. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet.
And as a health update: I survived my first ever night in the hospital (lifer!) and am now waiting for today’s tests. How civilized that hospitals today have wifi for their guests!
Painted Skimmer
Among the early season dragonflies, the Painted Skimmer is certainly a standout. It is big, for one thing, probably the biggest dragon in flight in mid-June in Southern Maine (excepting the few Green Darners I have seen so far…and this year at least as we are late with all the Onadata). The males, in particular, flash with orange fire as they fly over the marsh, and up close both males and females are a feast of pattern with their wing-spots and colored veins. I saw a few in flight on Sunday when I went dragon-prowling down by the mouth of the Mousam River in the marsh pools, but none perched close enough for a good photograph. I went back yesterday afternoon, specifically to see if I could do better, and was blessed to find one male and one female perched in easy reach of my lens. The male is on top here, and is the much oranger of the two.
Olympus OM-D E-M10 with 75-300mm zoom. 600mm equivalent. Shutter preferred at 1/640th. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet. Assembled in Pixlr Express.