Meadowhawk Dragonflies

I am sorry that the last couple of posts were kind of short. I did them very quickly, on Friday, before I left for a trip up north to Duluth Minnesota for Hawk Weekend at Hawk Ridge. I had planned to try and add some more to the posts in the evening after I was done taking pics unfortunately the hotel that I stayed in did not have wireless Internet and the only PC they had in their "business center" was a Mac.I have nothing against Mac but when 97 % of the US works on PCs and not Macs I think it is kind of a bad business decision to choose a Mac. In fact this is the only hotel that I have ever stayed in where they had a Mac. Well needless to say no one could figure out how to use it, myself included and I work with computers for a living, so no one at the hotel was able to use Internet. Good thing that I did those short posts in advance otherwise I would have broken my consecutive streak.

So for today I have some more dragons from the Bass Ponds that I took in July. These are all meadowhawks. Meadowhawks are smaller, an inch to an inch and a half, dragonflies that are commonly seen mostly in fields later in the summer and into the fall.
There are at least 8 types of meadowhawks in my area. Several of the different types are very difficult to distinguish between unless you have them under a magnifying lens, especially juveniles and females.
Most of the male meadowhawks in my area are red in color. The exceptions to this would be the black meadowhawk, which is all black, and the band-winged, which can sometimes appear brown. The variegated is red but has an unique pattern and the Autumn meadowhawk is the only one with yellow-legs. The other four types are very similar. Females of all the species are usually a yellow orange color. My guess is that these were white-faced meadowhawks, especially the males.

In his book Dragonflies of the North Woods, Kurt Mead, states that sometimes male whiteface dragons will fly in tandem with female cherry-faced or ruby dragonflies but they will rarely actually mate because their reproductive parts are not compatible.