The is nothing quite like the excitement of your first Odonata sighting of the spring! Dragonfly on the wing!

Okay. I get it. Not everyone shares my enthusiasm for dragonflies and damselflies, but still, you must have some empathy with a seasonal first…the first Robin in the yard…the first crocus…Lilacs blooming…the first bike ride of the spring…opening day at the golf club? Something must tickle your seasonal nose like the first sneeze of hay fever season! For me, these past few years, it has been the awakening of the Odonates. I haunt the ponds and pools where I have seen them past summers, hoping against hope, that the water is finally warm enought, that the hours of sunlight long enough, so that some brave nymph will crawl out of the water and transform into a full flying dragon or damsel. Yesterday, a visit to the warm, sunlit meadows along the Boston River at Emmons Preserve in rural Kennebunkport had its rewards. I saw three dragons on the wing…got decent photos of two…and both of those were new bugs for me! It does not get much better than that!

This is the Springtime Darner (appropriately named 🙂 . I had some difficulty identifying it as it looks like a Mosaic Darner…but is in a totally different part of the book. It is also a tendril…a freshly emerged bug…so it’s blue abdominal spots are not as blue as they will be tomorrow. (Visually, they were bluer than in the photo.)

These are also among my first dragonfly shots with my new wildlife rig…the Olympus OM-D E-M10 with 75-300mm zoom. That is 600mm equivalent that I can push to 1200mm using the Digital Tel-converter in the camera, as I did here. I am used to the much longer zoom on the Canon SX50HS, which started at 1200mm optical, with digital extension to 1800 and 2400mm equivalents. Still, I am hoping the increased image quality of the larger sensor in the Olympus Micro-four-thirds camera will more than make up for the extra effort of getting closer (when I can get closer). I am certainly happy with this shot.

1/640th @ ISO 640 @ f7.1. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet.