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.
Damselflies are kind of like skippers in the butterfly world or sparrows in birding, they are small, hard to photograph and difficult to ID. I believe the damsel above is a citrine forktail. The citrine forktail is the only damsel in the area that is a yellowish color with spots dividing each section of the abdomen.
The next damsel appears to be a spreadwing, due to its open wing pattern while it is perched. Due to the bronze color on its thorax and the green shoulder stripe I am going to say that this is a lyre-tipped spreadwing. What is more interesting to me is that if you look closely at the head you will notice that the damsel seems to be eating a small grasshopper.
Away we go from the confusing and hard to identify damselflies to the confusing and hard to identify female meadowhawks. Female meadowhawks will often be the same color as the males, red in most cases, but they can also be a yellow color like the one above. It is very difficult to distinguish between the females of several types of meadowhawks so instead of trying I will list several types that I am pretty sure that it is not. The face is not white enough for a white face and since the legs are black it is most definitely not an autumn meadowhawk, which have yellow legs. There does not look like enough color in the wings to be a saffron so that only leaves us with about 4 or 5 other types.
This dragon is definitely a dot-tailed whiteface, which I have photographed on numerous occasions in many different locations.
Finally we have a female twelve-spotted skimmer, which is another very common dragon. You can tell that she is female because she does not have white spots on her wings. You can tell that she is not a female widow skimmer because the yellow dots on the abdomen form a straight line not a jagged line like the widows does.
The familiar bluet are a fairly common damselfly that inhabit ponds and other marshy areas. The male familiar bluets, pictured above, have more blue then black on their abdomens with the eighth and ninth segments being entirely blue.
The female familiar bluet, the left most damselfly in the picture above, can be blue, tan or greenish with more black on the abdomen then the male, including black on the eighth and ninth segments.
Damselflies mate the same way that dragonflies do. The male begins by transferring sperm from his testes, under the ninth segment, to his hamulus, under the second segment. He then initiates the mating by grabbing the female by her thorax and head.
The male then begin to arch his abdomen downward while the female brings her abdomen up to the male's hamulus. This is called a wheel position and it is how copulation takes places. The pair will usually fly to a safe location or some dragonfly and damselfly copulate while in flight. This pair may have been attempting to get into the wheel position or they may have already been laying eggs with the male guarding the female. This type of guarding, where the male holds on to the female, is called contact guarding.
common buckeye
painted lady
pearl crescent
familiar bluet
mating familiar bluet
The evening ended with the book signing, dinner and a keynote speech by Ken Kaufman.
