Posts in Category: dragonflies
Nom nom nom. 12 Spotted Skimmer at lunch.
Nature red in tooth and claw! This is a Twelve Spotted Skimmer devouring what might be an Eldeberry Borer…a smaller beetle at any rate. The 12 Spots are the most present Odonata species in Southern Maine this year. They have been flying more than 2 months now, they are everywhere there is even a large puddle, they are big enough so you can’t miss them, and they are supper aggressive…chasing and driving off all other dragonflies from their patch (or attempting to). And as perch hunters, they are relatively easy to photograph. They spend at least a third of their time hung up on a branch or reed that gives them, and therefore me, a good view.
This one zipped by me at eyelevel and landed on a bush about 4 feet from me. I have hundreds of photos of 12 Spots from this year alone, but I figured I had better shoot it as it was so cooperative. Only when I got the camera up and focused did I see that it was devouring prey. You could almost hear the mandibles click. While it is a bad moment for the beetle, it was a very good moment for the dragonfly.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1680mm equivalent (with the 2x digital tel-converter function). f5.8 @ 1/500th @ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
White-faced Meadowhawk, Factory to Pasture Pond
The last week or so, White-faced Meadowhawks have been protecting territory along the edge of Factory to Pasture Pond. There are quite a few there, each male with its 5 feet of brush and shoreline. They get into little tiffs where territories touch…the males facing off in aggressive spiral flights, almost too fast for the eye to follow.
The Meadowhawks are smaller members of the larger Skimmer family and there are quite a few possible in Southern Maine. The White-faced is one of three bright red Meadowhawks, which differ primarily in the color of the face. The Cherry-faced has a slight red tinge to the face, while the Ruby tends toward a tan color. Other than that they are pretty hard to tell apart. I suspect I have a shot of a Cherry in amongst my White-faced shots, as I remember seeing a darker face, but I have not found it yet 🙂 It is certainly not among the images I have processed so far.
Second image is the female of the species, and what all the fuss is about among the males.
Then we have one from above, and one side on. The last shot was taken along the edge of the pond that is forested, so the Meadowhawks seem to establish territory even in taller trees.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. Shots at 1240 and 1680mm equivalent field of view using the full optical zoom, and either 1.5x or 2x digital tel-converter function. f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 800, 320, 320, and 100.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Northern Broken-dash on Northern Blazing Star, Kennebunk Plains
Happy Sunday!
My little electric scooter and I took our longest trip to date yesterday…from the house to the Kennebunk Plains, about 13 miles round-trip. That is the absolute limits of its range, at least up and down hill and carrying my considerable weight. I got back under power, but I was down to about 8 mph at the end. 🙂
I wanted to try for the Plains in part to test the limits of the scooter, but, of course, in part to see what was happening on the Plains. I have written about the Plains before, but essentially they are sand plains, kept open as kind of tall grass prairie, well out of place in forested Southern Maine, by a combination of natural wildfire (now managed) and soil conditions, and home to several endangered species. Grasshopper Sparrow, Clay-collared Sparrow, and Upland Sandpiper all reach range limits on the Plains, but it was first protected, by the Nature Conservancy, because of the presence of the Northern Blackracer snake and Northern Blazing Star wildflower. Management and ownership of most of the property has now been turned over to the State of Maine, and lumped together into a larger conservation area that embraces almost all of the habitat.
The area where Route 99 crosses is known locally as the Blueberry Plains, and it is still about the only place in Southern Maine where you can fill a bucket with wild low-bush blueberries. Picking is allowed during the month of August, but I saw a few people (who apparently believe that the law does not apply to them) picking yesterday. These early berries are supposed to be for the wildlife. Of course maybe these folks just did not read the numerous signs to that effect.
The Northern Blazing Star was just coming into bloom yesterday, but I could see that the show should be spectacular in another week or two. Lots of plants, tall and well grown, covered in buds about to open. The one in the image is only about half open, but already it had attracted a Northern Broken-dash Skipper, who was extracting nectar…sipping nectar…from down deep in the flower.
The other thing I was looking for, of course, was dragonflies. There were a few, but they were flying high yesterday and not perching. I did hike down to the pond on the backside of the Plains along Cold Brook, where I found a female Common Whitetail (a first for me, and pictured here) and a newly emerged Widow Skimmer, along with a few Ebony Jewelwings haunting the stream where it leaves the pond.
The most common Odo at the Plains yesterday was some kind of female (I think) damselfly of the Bluet variety. The female bluets are mostly all similar enough so it is not safe to make an id without a specimen in hand, and way more knowledge than I have.
And we will return to the Blazing Star for the final image. This one with one of the smallest metallic bees (or hover fly maybe) that I have ever seen.
I will, of course, be going back to the Plains some Saturday or Sunday afternoon soon, to catch more of the Blazing Star show, and maybe find a few perched Meadowhawks. 🙂 but for now, the Sunday Thought:
My tag line on Google+ is “kind of walking the line where technology and spirituality meet”. By that I mean that I am pretty much a geek when it comes to technology. I like camera tech, computer tech, tablet tech, phone tech, and even electric scooter tech. I want stuff that works…and it has to work because, maybe beyond geekdom, I actually do use the tech. I take pictures and video, I record sounds, I write words…I process the same on the computer…I show it off on my tablet…I tell people about it on computer, tablet and phone. And I get to the places, these days, at least locally, on my electric scooter. So I am geek who actually uses the tech for what it was made to do.
But way beyond that, nothing I do is complete until it is shared. Yes I show my stuff to friends and family, but I also blog (here and elsewhere), I twitter, I Facebook, I Google+. To me the miracle of modern technology is how easy it makes it to both create and share content…to catch your bit of the world and life, make a bit of meaning out of it, and broadcast it to a, relatively speaking, wide audience. Almost 27,000 people have me in circles on Google+. That is a small number compared to the super-stars of the internet, but it is a huge number compared to the number of people I could have touched even 10 years ago (without being noticeably rich, famous, or powerful).
And that is where the spirituality comes in. It is, I am certain, a spiritual act to catch your bit of the world and life, and to make a bit of meaning out of it. It is, I am certain, a spiritual act to share whatever meaning we make. And, for me, the more I share, the more certain I become that there is only one Spirit that gives meaning to all of us, and that my only value in life or in the world, comes from touching that Spirit, and sharing that Spirit. Personally, my experience has lead me to identify that Spirit with what most of us call God, and specifically with the God of love who we know, who we can come to know, in Jesus Christ. That is my experience, and, for me, it gives a whole new layer of meaning to what I make of the world and life.
So I take a moment, each Sunday, as I continue my walk along the line where technology and spirituality meet, to celebrate the Spirit that moves us all…with digital images and word-processed words…on a computer, through the internet, and out to you…so you can experience a bit of the meaning I made of a Northern Broken-dash Skipper sipping nectar from a Northern Blazing Star on the Kennebunk Plains. 🙂
Eastern Pondhawk, Roger’s Pond, Kennebunk ME
I first saw an Eastern Pondhawk in New Jersey, while doing my informal photographic Big Day in conjunction with the World Series of Birding (see my Google+ post). It was a female and I immediately decided it was my new favorite dragonfly. I have caught two glimpses of a female here in Maine, both at Roger’s Pond. One landed at my feet last week, but I could not get the camera on it before it was driven off by the very aggressive Blue Dashers patrolling the shore.
This fellow was on the other side of the pond a few days later, and it was not until I got the images home and had my books out that I realized that it is the male Eastern Pondhawk. Very different! And certainly beautiful in its own way, if more subtle than the female. (Further research has shown that this is an immature male, which complicates the picture. The full adult male would lack the aqua shading, though it would retain the green face.)
In flight, and in good light, the apple-green face is very striking, though the dragon needs to be perched to appreciate the subtle slide from aqua to salty blue on the body.
As I say, the female, which I finally caught in camera a few days ago, is very different. I was actually on my scooter circling the pond when I saw her on a reed. I was off the scooter and camera in hand as fast as I could go. Even so, I had only seconds to get on her before the Blue Dashers drove her away again, and I never got as close as I would have liked. Still.
Together, the Eastern Pondhawks are one of the more interesting pairings. If you saw them mating, or otherwise together in the same frame, you might suspect they were two different species. It apparently works for them though 🙂
(It appears that both Male and Female Eastern Pondhawks are actually green. Even males start out green. The blue on the male is a waxy, powdery coating, called pruinosity, which develops on a lot of dragonflies as they mature, covering the true colors underneath.)
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. All at 1680mm equivalent (using the 2x digital tel-converter function). f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 125 (male), and 1/1000th @ ISO 400 (female).
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Canada Darner Ovapositing. Factory to Pasture Pond
I hope you will bear with me…I seem to be taking a lot of dragon and damselfly pics lately. 🙂
Darners are generally among the largest North American Dragonflies, and they are flyers, not perchers.
That is to say that Darners hunt on the wing, flying down smaller insects and taking them in mid-air, patrolling their territory endlessly from first light to last, never sitting down all day long. They are constantly in flight…constantly in motion.
Perchers on the other hand, settle often, and hunt from the perch…flying out only when an insect comes near enough to capture, spending a lot of the day resting.
In my experience, Skimmers fall somewhere between, spending most of the day hunting on the wing, but settling for a rest about once every 15 moments.
As you can imagine, Darners are very difficult to photograph. About the only time you find them perched (hung up in Odonata-speak) is early in the morning when it is still too cool to fly (and when they are, by the way, very difficult to find), and when mating (sometimes the females will hang up to wait for a passing male), and the actual act is done while perched.
The only other time you can photograph them easily is when the female is ovapositing…laying eggs. The Darner’s I have seen are very deliberate ovapositors…settling on vegetation that emerges from the water and reaching carefully down under the water line (or at least as far as very wet wood) to deposit eggs. This deliberation keeps them still enough for photographs.
I have generally seen them do this while still attached to the male, but this Canada Darner female was all on her own at Factory to Pasture Pond (a little, heavily overgrown pond here in Kennebunk, ideal at this time of year for Odonata). She moved from broken reed stalk to broken reed stalk, carefully working around each to deposit eggs. I never did see the male.
And I have not seen her again either. I watched her for an hour or more and then had to move on, and, despite several visits to the pond and to other ponds nearby, I have not found this or any other Canada Darner. Strange.
I am not sure what kind of water supply Factory to Pasture Pond has. There is certainly no brook feeding it. I suspect the water level will have to say pretty much where it is for the eggs to survive, but I could be wrong. I certainly well be checking for emerging Canada Darners come next July. 🙂
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1240mm and 1680mm equivalent fields of view. f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 250-500 (not very good light after all). Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
7/10/2012: Common Whitetail
According to Dragonflies and Damselflies of the East by Dennis Paulson, the Common Whitetail lives up to its name…it is both common and widespread across the US, and it certainly has a white tail. I have seen it briefly and from afar at the Dragon Ponds down in the river marsh here in Maine, and then close up in Virginia by a pond on a gulf course at the resort my company was using for a training. It was real treat to find two males disputing over the little Arrowroot pond between Roger’s Pond and the Mousam River…a pond the size of a bathtub…and a female laying eggs in a corner. Great afternoon light and effective perches made for my first really good shots of the bug.
They call that effect on the abdomen (tail) of the dragonfly pruinosity, from the Latin for “frost”…as in “frosted with a white powder”. It happens to many species of dragonflies on various parts of their bodies, but is most pronounced here on the Whitetail.
And then we have the female ovapositing…laying eggs in the water. She bounded up and down in one spot, striking the surface with her abdomen over and over. The final image is of the male in a somewhat defensive posture. There was, as I said, another male attempting to dislodge this one from the pond. This one seemed to be protecting the female from the other male as she did her thing.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1240 and 1680mm equivalent fields of view. f5.8 @ 1/500 to !/1000th sec. @ ISO 125-200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
7/4/2012: Twelve-spotted Skimmers, Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens
Happy 4th of July to you all.
You may have noticed that I am going through a dragonfly phase(or more properly, an odonata phase, since I am equally interested in damselflies). Though I had taken a few dragonfly images before, I mark a particular photograph of a Twelve-spotted Skimmer taken at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens almost exactly a year ago as the beginning of the phase.
Yesterday my wife and I took a trip back to the CMBC (it is somewhat of an anniversary tradition), and there were hundreds of Twelve-spotted Skimmers patrolling the ponds and the walks of the gardens. The TsS is a spectacular dragon at any time, but turn a hundred of them loose in a world-class botanical garden on a bright summer day and you do get some pretty interesting photo ops!
The lead two images are the male (I saw only three females the whole day). The following image is the female, and the third is a female in flight, as she deposited eggs in the water of one of the ornamental pools. The blur to her right is a male diving on her. Then a head on shot of a perched female.
Some of the males were showing their age. You can see the nick out of the edge of the wing in the 7th shot and evidently the 8th is the survivor of a bird attack. Still, I could not resist him on the furled iris.
And last but not least, two shots of unusual poses: on a giant rose blossom, and decorating the Hillside 8 sign.
Finally I can’t resist adding this dragonfly…not a Twelve-spotted Skimmer as near as I can tell…but impressive none the less. It has a 6 foot wing-span and is mounted about 10 feet from the ground at the Azalea gardens. The avid dragonfly collector can take it home (well, can have it shipped home) for only $14,000.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. Various combinations of zoom and digital tel-converter for equivalent fields of view from 840mm to 1680mm. f5.8 at ISOs ranging from 100 to 320 and shutter speeds from 1/100th to 1/1000th.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
7/1/2012: The Dragon Ponds. Happy Sunday!
As I have mentioned before, the Kennebunk Bridle Path is an old, abandoned trolley line that runs from Kennebunk to Kennebunkport within site of the Mousam River…a reminder of a gentler age of tourism in the Kennebunks. Today it runs through large sections of Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge and Kennebunk Land Trust Conservation lands. It is mostly used by joggers, bicyclist, and dog walkers, but it provides easy access to some very rich habitat along the river for those of us interested in such things.
Since discovering the joy of watching dragon- and damselflies, almost exactly a year ago this week, I have a new reason to explore the Bridle Path. On either side of where it crosses Route 9 near the Mousam bridge, it runs through marshland with lots of small ponds and pools. It takes a very high tide to flood the marsh (though it happens on occasion) so the water in these ponds and pools is mostly fresh. And they are surrounded by marsh grass standing in a few inches to a foot of water on a very spongy bed. Along the rise of the Bridle Trail, and in the forest edge behind the marsh, larger bushes and small trees provide perches. It is an ideal dragon- and damselfly hatchery, and provides the emergent adults with an excellent hunting ground. Now that I am paying attention, I have seen dozens of species there already this spring and summer.
So I have taken to calling one particularly rich area, where a small stream runs through the marsh and under the Bridle Path, the dragon ponds. “I am off on my scooter to the dragon ponds,” I say to my wife, and she knows just where I will be. It is 2.2 miles one way (with a quarter mile walk at the end), so it is an easy ride on Froggy the Scoot. (I can ever ride right to the pools along the Path, but mostly I walk in from Route 9.) Froggy (due to the neon green color), is seen here parked by the ponds yesterday (which are, believe me, out there in the grass). I actually bought Froggy the Scoot to be able to get to the ponds more often.
The lead photo is a female Widow Skimmer. I have seen the female several times now, but I have yet to find a male.
By far the most abundant dragonfly in the Ponds is the Seaside Dragonlet. This is a tiny dragonfly by dragonfly standards…most individuals are less than inch long. They perch a lot, compared to other dragons, so they are relatively easy to photograph. This is a female, and a male and female in tandem follows.
There are also damselflies. The most common, by far, is Eastern Forktail. What we have in the next photo is a closely related Citrine Forktail, the first I have seen at the Dragon Ponds.
Next we have a Four-spotted Skimmer, almost as common as the Seaside Dragonlets, and certainly the most common of the bigger dragons.
And I will follow that with another Skimmer, this time the Twelve-spotted Skimmer. They have emerged within the past few days, and are already present in some numbers.
The real prize yesterday, though I don’t yet have a fully satisfying image, was several Halloween Pennants Painted Skimmers patrolling the marsh (Ed note: still learning!). These are strong flyers, very orange in the sun, who rarely perch, so I spent about a hour and a half watching and waiting. I had given up several times and tried to get back on Froggy the Scoot to go home, only to have one fly tantalizing close and tempt me back to the edge of the marsh. One did finally perch within photo range…but by then the wind was up and the dragonfly picked such a high perch in the marsh grasses that, with the wind wiping the grass, it might almost as well have still been flying. Still…it is a magnificent dragon!
All this in a few hours at the Dragon Ponds.
And for the Sunday thought. As I stood watching the Halloween Pennants Painted Skimmers patrolling, following a relatively predictable pattern over the marsh, always out of reach, I found my self willing them to perch! I came as far as muttering it under my breath like an incantation. “Perch. Please perch.” “Go on. Perch right there!” “Please.”
I was not under any illusion that my plea would effect the dragonflies, even if I spoke out-loud. Dragonflies clearly have business of their own which has nothing to do with me or my desire to photograph them. I will admit to getting very wet feet trying to reach a pool in the marsh were they seemed to congregate at one point, but chasing dragonflies on the wing is even more futile that asking them to perch.
No, I know who I am addressing. My mutters are not a plea to the dragonflies, but a prayer to the spirit that moves in both them and me. I am asking for a blessing, plain and simple, knowing I don’t deserve one and that I can’t earn it no matter how patient I am. Dragonflies will fly, unless, of course, they perch. When this one did, and I finally got the camera to focus on it while it clung to the waving grass, and I shot of a few bursts of images, it was purely a gift, and I was impossibly thankful.
It made my day. It sustained me when Froggy the Scoot ran out of battery half way home. it kept a smile on my face while I sweated the scooter up the final little hill and across the yard. It blossomed to an irrepressible grin when I got the images up on the laptop and saw I had a few keepers.
I know I am blessed to have the Dragon Ponds within reach. I have been especially blessed by a perching Halloween Pennant Painted Skimmers. It is not world peace, or an end to hunger, I know, but it makes me happy, hopeful, full of quiet joy. This is, I think, a good thing. Happy Sunday from the Dragon Ponds.
6/30/2012: Dark Female Seaside Dragonlet
This is the first day of a few days of vacation and I am clearly all discombobulated. I have been to the dragon ponds down by the river twice already on my scooter, and processed images in between, but I have not posted my Pic 4 Today. Here goes.
This is a dark form, female Seaside Dragonlet. I have posted the more common orange tiger striped variety before, but this one is so nicely posed I could not resist.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1680mm equivalent field of view (840 optical zoom plus 2x digital tel-converter function). f5.8 @ 1/320th @ ISO 200.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
6/27/2012: Orange Bluets in Tandem
I am still in Virginia at the Virginia Crossings Wyndham Resort doing the corporate retreat. This is another find from my little photoprowel down by the golf course ponds. This is a pre- or post-mating tandem pair of Orange Bluets. There are many Bluets damselflies in North America, and most of them are a bold electric blue…or at least the males are. The Orange is clearly a member of the family despite its color. The male could be mistaken for many of the females of other species, and but none are quite as aggressively orange! Electric orange? It must be the height of breeding for Oranges, since tandem pairs outnumbered single damselflies.
Canon SX40HS in Program with – 1 /3EV exposure compensation. 1680mm equivalent field of view. f5.8 @ 1/60th @ ISO 800. Because the evening light was low I set the ISO manually to get workable shutter-speeds…and even then the Canon image-stabilization was stretched to its limits at such high magnification. This image begins to break down at larger viewing sizes, but it is a fun image on your average monitor or laptop. 🙂
Processed on my Xoom Android Tablet in PicSay Pro for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.