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.