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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.