Twelve-spotted Skimmer

Twelve-spotted Skimmer

MN Valley NWR: Rapids Lake Unit

I have visited the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge often over the past several years, however the refuge is broken up into several different units stretching southwest along the Minnesota River. Since I spend most of my time at the Long Meadow portion of the refuge, which includes the refuge headquarters, Bass Ponds, and Old Cedar Avenue Bridge, I decided to explore some of the other units this summer.

So on August 8th I headed down to the Rapids Lake unit of the Minnesota Valley NWR. The Rapids Lake unit is the newest edition to the refuge and it is located in Carver County, which is south of the Twin Cities. It is the only unit, other then Long Meadow, that has an interpretive visitors center, which you can see from the photo above has an impressive view.

The Rapids Lake unit consists of 1500 acres on the west bank of the Minnesota River. It has a variety of habitats including oak savanna, goat prairie bluffs, bottomland forests and restored wetlands. There are also three lakes in the unit, Long Lake, Horseshoe Lake and Rapids Lake, for which the unit is named for. Across the Minnesota River, on the east bank, sits the Louisville Swamp unit.
Much of this unit once belonged to the Gehl Family. The Gehls used the land to raise thousands of turkeys. Turkeys still roam the lands but now they are wild turkeys, all of the domestic birds were removed before they could bread with wild turkeys because the offspring would not be able to live on their own in the wild. The old Gehl farmhouse is just down the path from the visitors center.

One of the main reasons that I choose to visit this unit was because Carver County is one of many counties that needs some serious surveying for Odonata, dragons and damsels. I have spent quite a bit of time this summer volunteering with the Minnesota Odonata Survey Project trying to survey every county. This has included traveling to every corner of the state, but I was surprised to find that Carver County, which is only about 45 minutes from home, had less then 10 types of odonates on their county list.

I found several new species to add to the list including the common whitetail and 12 spotted skimmer, pictured above respectively, and lance-tipped darner, green darner, widow skimmer, blue dasher, white-faced meadowhawk, autumn meadowhawk and common pondhawk. I also found several types of damselfly that had not yet been surveyed.

Besides dragonfly I also saw butterflies, like these mating common sulphur, belted kingfisher, herons and a couple of other types of birds. Unfortunately the heat that day was pretty unbearable, with a 110 degree heat index, so I did not stay very long. I will need to make another trip back down, maybe during the fall bird migration.

Twelve-spotted Skimmer

The Rest of the Dragons at the Bass Ponds

There were also a few other types of dragonfly that I photographed on my trip to the Bass Ponds back in July.
The twelve spotted skimmer is one of the most common dragons around. It is easily recognized, by the spots on the wings, and usually perches in the open making them easy to photograph. An added bonus is that if they flush when approached they will typically land back on the same perch or one near by.
The common whitetail male is also pretty hard to mistake. The wing pattern along with the white pruinose abdomen make them recognizable from a pretty good distance away. The female common whitetail looks a lot like a female twelve-spotted skimmer.

Another common pond dragon that is a member of the skimmer family is the widow skimmer.
Widow skimmers are identified by the black and the white pruinose bands on their wings. The female widow skimmer only has the black band and does not get pruinose on the wings or abdomen.
One dragon that was not as common as the rest, that I was able to photograph that day, is the eastern amberwing. These small dragons are usually less then an inch long and prefer still or slow moving water.
This was a male eastern amberwing, you can tell because the wings are completely colored. The female amberwing has a wing pattern that is similar to the Halloween pennant, although they are quite a bit smaller.
The final dragon that I photographed was the four-spotted skimmer. This type of dragon can be found all over the globe including North America, Europe, North Africa and Asia.

Dragonflies at Wood Lake Nature Center

Wood Lake Nature Center is located in the heart of Richfield, MN, which is a southern suburb of Minneapolis. The lake itself is very shallow and has to be dredged in the past. These are pretty good conditions for dragonflies so I am always on the look out while I am there for some dragon pics.
Back in the middle of July I found a few dragons. The first one, pictured above, is a great face shot but the angle makes it difficult for me to ID it. Maybe if I had some more experience I would not have problems but this is only my second summer photographing dragons. I believe that it may be a juvenile female blue dasher but I am not 100% sure. The juvenile females are brown with yellow markings on the thorax and abdomen. As the male and female age their abdomen turns blue with pruinose.
This dragon is definitely a male twelve-spotted skimmer. We know that he is male because the pattern of the spots on the wings as well as the white spots, which the females do not have. He has probably been around for a while because his abdomen has turned blue with pruinosity.
This female widow skimmer also looks like she has been around a while, at least in dragonfly terms which is measured in days or possibly weeks. You can see the age in her wings. The male widow skimmer has white bands on the wings located just outside the black patches at the base.

Bass Ponds Dragonflies

On Monday July 14th it was a nice day so I decided to go and visit the Bass Ponds after work. In midsummer there is not usually a lot of birds around the Bass Ponds, but there are sure a lot of pond dwelling dragonflies to photograph.
The twelve-spotted skimmer is named for the black spots on its wings. You can see from both the picture above and the picture below that each of the four wings contains three black spots for a total of twelve all together. The male twelve spotters also have white spots in between the black spots so both of the pictured twelve spots are male.
Twelve-spots are pretty easy to photograph. Since they are fairly common dragonfly through out most of North America, except for the extremes, they are usually pretty easy to find. There size and the fact that they like to perch on the tops of sturdy vegetation also aides in finding this species. The best part though is that if you get to close and flush a twelve-spot chances are he will come back and land in almost the exact same spot. So all that you need to do is sit and wait.
The eastern pondhawk is not quite as easy to photograph as the twelve-spot. They are much less common and prefer to hunt from the ground, as pictured above, or a low perch. Females and immature males are green, but as the males mature they gain a powder blue pruinosity which begins from the end of their abdomen and eventually covers most of their body.
It is a bit more difficult to see the spots on the four spotted skimmer then on the twelve-spotted. The spots are the stigma, small colored patch at the end of every dragonflies wing, which is black and a heavy black nodal spot. The nodal spot is where a cluster of veins join together near the center of the front edge of each wing. All dragons have a nodal spot although on most it is not as visible as it is on the four-spotted. The four-spotted skimmer pictured above is probably pretty mature, you can tell because it has lost most of the color in its wings and its abdomen is fairly dark.
I think that it is strange that they call them four-spotted skimmers. Since they have 2 spots on each wing they actually have a total of eight spots, if you count them the way that twelve-spotted are counted.

Woodlake Dragonflies

Well I am finally almost finished with pictures that I took in June. Since August is almost over that means that I am only about 2 months behind. I am fortunate though, to be so far behind, because that means that it has been a great summer. I have spent a lot of quality time outside photographing nature. Four months from now I will be happy to be photographing anything that is not snow or ice. So here are some more dragons that I photographed at Wood Lake Nature Center the last weekend in June.
This first picture is of a female meadowhawk. I am not sure specifically which kind. At the dragonfly workshop that I attended last weekend, we talked a little bit about identifying meadowhawks. There are a couple of types that can be identified by field markings, like the whiteface and the autumn, however most of the others can only be identified if you have them in hand and are looking at them through a magnifying lens. Even then only the males are usually identifiable this way. So its best just to identify females as meadowhawks and leave it at that.

This is also a female but the type is a twelve-spotted skimmer. Twelve-spotted skimmers are very common and easily recognisable, although it is sometimes easy to confuse the female twelve-spotted and the similar looking female common white tail.
The dot-tailed white face is one of the earliest dragons that we see in the year. They usually begin to fly in May.
This picture demonstrates pretty well where the dot-tailed whiteface got its name. This is much more obvious on the males, like the one above, then the females, who typically have more then a single spot on the top of their abdomen.
It is a little difficult to see all the differences between male and female in this shot of a pair in the wheel mating formation but you can still tell that they do look different.
Damselflies also mate in the wheel formation. They are even more difficult to distinguish the type, with out close examination with a magnifying lens, then dragons are. Since I did not want to disturb their reproduction I will just ID them as damselflies.

Dragons at Carlos Avery

There were also quite a few dragonflies at Carlos Avery that weekend, bad for mosquitoes, good for me, although we could have used a few more of the larger types to help with the run away deer fly population.
The dot-tailed white face is fairly common in this area. They are one of the first dragonflies that we see in the late spring and are usually around until October.
The frosted whiteface are typically only found in the Great Lakes and the North East.

Their preferred habitat is vegetated ponds or lakes especially ones with a lot of floating sphagnum moss.
They typically hunt by perching on vegetation and waiting for their prey.

Female frosted whiteface looks much different then the male with only the white face and black abdomen sections looking the same in both male and female.

Although their habitat is typically around water I found most of these frosted white face in a small section of short grass near an intersection of two road. There is plenty of green ponds, pools and flowages in Carlos Avery so water is never too far away but I was surprised that these dragons seemed to prefer this open grass.
At first glance I thought that this was another frosted whiteface as I spotted him facing away sitting on the ground, but on closer examination I identified this dragon as a chalk-fronted corporal. The white on the front portion of the thorax is what gave it away, notice the male frosted whitefaces above have a black front thorax. The white front thorax is how the chalk-fronted corporal got its name, as they resemble corporal stripes. Another dead give away if you see one from the front is the lack of a white face. Chalk-fronted corporals like to hunt from a perch on the ground as shown above.
As usual there were quite a few twelve-spotted skimmers about. I am guessing that this one is a female because the males typically white areas between the dark spots on their wings.
Another dragon that typically hunts by perching on vegetation is the widow skimmer. This widower is a female. Males are typically a dusky blue with white patches that follow the black patches on the wing. Immature widowers look a lot like the female however the female usually have a black ting at the tip of their wings.

Twelve-Spotted Skimmer Dragonfly

The dragonfly population, which had been some stagnant mostly due to the late winter that we had, seemed to explode in the middle of June. This was a good thing, as the birding had gotten a bit stagnant after the migration and there were few butterflies around to photograph.
So while I did shoot some bird pix, when I visited Dodge Nature Center at mid month I spent a lot more of my time photographing dragonflies.
One of the most common dragonflies around the Twin Cities so far this year is the twelve-spotted skimmer.
These fairly large dragonflies, up to about 2 inches long, are named for the dark spots on their wings. Each wing has three brown spots for a total of twelve total spots.
It is usually easy to identify the males by white spots in between the brown spots. The females are a bit more tricky because they have little to no white spots on their wings and resemble the female common whitetail dragonfly. However the twelve-spot females are typically larges and the yellow spots running down the sides of their abdomen line up in a fairly straight line. On the whitetails the yellow spots form a jagged line.