Teneral Dragonfly

I went out to Crex Meadows yesterday hoping to get some video of butterflies for an upcoming program I am doing. While I out checking the butterfly weed I found this teneral dragonfly perched on the flower. Dragonflies are predators, they do not eat nectar or pollen like butterflies, however when they first emerge from their larval stage they are vulnerable and usually find an out of the way place to perch while their wings firm. I would guess that this is some kind of meadowhawk but teneral dragonflies are often hard to identify because they usually have not developed their field markings yet. With its orangish coloration the butterfly weed was a good place to perch because it blended in nicely. 

Emerging

This weekend I went out for my first big dragonfly hunt of the year. On Saturday I went down to the Murphy-Hamrahan Park Reserve down in Savage, MN. At Murphy-Hamrahan I was mostly looking to get some better hooded and blue-winged warbler pics but ended up getting quite distracted by the large number of chalk-fronted corporals and other dragons.
Today I headed up north to Wild River State Park,In my opinion Wild River is the best place to find clubtail dragons in Minnesota. This year the dragons seem to be a little behind in emerging from their larval state. I am sure it has to do with the fact that spring began a bit late this year. Odonates, dragonfly and damselfly spend a good portion of their life living in the water during their larval state. When it is finally time to fly the nymph crawls out of the water on to a rock or something and emerges from its skin.

The husk that is left behind is called an exuviae. The top photo is an example of a clubtail exuviae. If you look carefully you can see the hole that the dragonfly emerged from. Once a dragon or damsel emerges they unfurl their wings by pumping them full of hemolymph, insect blood. They then draw the blood back into their body and wait for their wings to dry. At this point they do not have much of their color and are called teneral, immature dragon\damsel. The teneral in the last two pics above is a jewelwing damselfly. Soon its thorax and abdomen will turn metallic green and its wings will change to ebony black. These pictures are ones that I took in the past but today I spotted many tenerals and exuviae most of which were clubtails.

Darner Dragonflies

Dragonflies are fierce predators through out their life. Most of a dragonflies life is spent under water in their larval form. This typically take one to three years. Even at this early stage in their development they are already on the hunt. Almost anything that moves in the water is potential prey, including mosquito larva, aquatic insects, other dragonfly larva, tadpoles and small fish.

The larva eat with a voracious appetite. As they grow they go through a series of molts until they are ready to emerge. At this point they go into a rest state for a day or two, called diapause, when the finally changes between aquatic and flight form take place. These photos are of a type of blue darner dragon. Unfortunately I was unable to get a good shot of the side stripes on the thorax and so I can not identify it. It was taken in the Minnesota Valley NWR in October.

Maplewood Dragonfly Workshop

When I began this blog my subjects were mainly birds with a few mammals that I photographed mainly while we were on vacation. After a while I found myself getting kind of bored in the middle of summer because I was mostly seeing the same types of birds each time I went out.

That was when I began to photograph other things that I found interesting. At first it was butterflies, which seems to go natural with birds, but then I started getting interested in dragonflies like the big green darners featured in the photographs above.

I remember catching dragonflies by the tail in the long grass when I was a kid but I did not really know a lot about them. So I started reading about dragonflies on the web and came across the website for the Minnesota Odonata Survey Project. I found a lot of good info on Minnesota dragonflies on their site and also found that they sponsored some workshops. So I took my first dragonfly workshop in August of 2008 at the Maplewood Nature Center. By this time I already knew that I had really been catching damselflies, like the one above by the abdomen when I was a kid.

Damselflies are typically smaller then dragonflies, however some of the larger damsels are bigger then the small dragons. All four of the damselflies wings are the same size and shape where a dragons hind wing typically differ in size and shape from the forewing. When perched damselflies will hold their wings together up over their abdomen while dragons rest their wings out to the side. The exception to this are the spreadwing damsels that rest, as their names suggest, with their wings spread. The photo above is a slender spreadwing damselfly.

Damselflies also have separated eyes, like this spotted spreadwing. Most dragonflies have eyes that touch each other at some point. Again there is an exception to this rule because clubtail and snaketail dragonflies also have separated eyes. All of these photos were taken at the dragonfly workshop in August 2008.

Wordless Wednesday: Darner Dragonfly

Happy Wordless Earthday: Darner Dragonfly

Wordless Wednesday: The Dragons of Old Cedar

Dodge Dragonflies

Well it looks like the mainboard on my PC is fried. I had hoped that it was just the power supply but no such luck. Fortunately I have more then one PC. So I spent Friday evening into Saturday morning transferring data and installing programs so that I would be fully functional again. It has been a beautiful weekend so besides all the computer repair I have also gone out and taken another 20gb worth of pics. It will take a while to get them sorted, cropped and posted but that shouldn't matter too much since I still have over a months worth of pics in back log. So here are a couple more dragon pics. I took these at Dodge Nature Center the last weekend in June.
This first one is a meadowhawk, although I am not sure which type. The face does not appear white enough for a white face and since the legs are black it can not be an autumn. That is about as far as I can narrow it down other then this is a female, the male would typically be red in color.
This second dragon is also female but unlike the first it is easy to ID. This is a female widow skimmer. The male widow skimmer is blue in color.

Old Cedar dragonfly

I apologize in advance for this short post. Today has not been exactly fun. After work I had to come home and replace the bathroom sink which has been leaking. Plumbing is not exactly my forte but I managed to get it replaced alright. When I finally finished I sat down to do some work on the computer but my main PC would not power up. Fortunately I have another PC that I can use but I spent most of the rest of this evening trying to get my main machine up and running. I am hoping that it is only the power supply so I will buy and new one and try replacing it tomorrow. For today I leave you with a couple of dragonfly that I photographed at Old Cedar Bridge at the end of June.

Common white tail
Male twelve-spotted skimmer.

Hopefully things will be back to normal tomorrow because it sounds like the weather is going to be very cooperative this weekend and I would prefer going out to staying home and building a new computer.

Necedah Dragonflies and Damselflies

Well I am back from my shorebird workshop in South Dakota. I had a pretty good experience. We spotted 17 different shorebird species and I was able to identify most of them from pictures at the end of the seminar. We got up pretty close to some of the birds so I have some nice pics to post and I will also share some of the info that I learned. The biggest excitement of the weekend for me though was a burrowing owl. I have photographed burrowing owls in south western Minnesota, last year and in southern California many years ago but it is a raptor that I do not often see so I visited the field where it has been spending some time on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I have a lot of pics to go through, plus I am currently still posting pics that I took in June so it might be a little while before I get them on line.

For now I have one last post from our trip to Necedah NWR in June. This time it is dragonfly and damselfly.
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.

Hopefully my IDs are correct but if you think I have made a mistake, except on the last 2 which I am sure about, then please leave a comment and let me know. That is one of the ways in which I continue to learn.

Dragons at Lake Nokomis

Lake Nokomis is a lake in south Minneapolis that many people in the Twin Cities visit for a little fun in the sun. The main beach is usually crowded with people laying out to get a tan or splashing out in the waves. On the other side of the lake there is smaller less trendy beach that usually caters to a bit older crowd. One afternoon in June I decided to stop over at Lake Nokomis after work,but I did not bring my beach towel, swimming suit or suntan lotion, instead I brought bug spray and my camera.
My goal was to have fun at the lake shore but that did not necessarily involve the beach, so I spent my afternoon exploring the wilder sides of Lake Nokomis.
Even though there were quite a few birds in the trees surrounding the lake I was more interested in the dragons that I found in the shoreline vegetation.

The first dragons that caught my eye was this pair of green darners. Since the two dragons were in tandem, male is grasping the back of the females head, I thought that she would arch her abdomen up to his and form into the wheel position for mating.
After watching for a couple seconds I realized that they had already finished mating and were in the process of laying the eggs. The female would continually reach her abdomen into the water to deposit the eggs on the underwater vegetation. The male was exhibiting contact guarding, meaning that he continued to hold on to the female until she was finished laying the eggs to ensure that no other male would mate with her.
The twelve-spotted skimmer can often be seen perched on a branch or other vegetation on the edges of ponds, marshy lakes, or slow moving streams.
From their perch they protect their territory from other males as well as hunt for flying insects.

I also found my second clubtailed dragonfly. This time it was a cobra clubtail. Unfortunately it was perched on a sign near the shore of the lake. I took a couple of pics and then tried to move around to get a different angle but unfortunately it took off and I lost it.

Dragons in Love

Ecobirder started as a way to share my nature photography with others. In the past Michelle, my wife, and I have taken trips all over the US to take pictures of moose, bears, coyote, elk, whales, raptors, and other wildlife. Unfortunately jobs and expenses do not let us travel enough for me to produce a quality blog just with pictures from our travels. So I started doing more bird photography because it was a way that I could get out in my spare time with out having to travel around the country. Last summer I found a couple of other subjects that I became interested in that became an important part of the blog, butterflies and dragonflies. Unfortunately nether of these are around in Minnesota during the winter so it has been a while since I have had a good opportunity to photograph them with any variety or regularity. While I have already seen, and photographed, several types of butterflies this year I have been anxiously waiting for the dragonfly season to begin. I have seen a fair number of the larger green darner dragonflies, these are the big ones that fly south for the winter like the birds do, I even was able to photograph one hovering at the Dodge Nature Center a couple weeks ago, but most of the smaller types, that die out in the winter, are currently in their larval state.

The darners are difficult to photograph because they do not land very often.
That is why I was excited when I spotted 2 green darner dragonflies mating at the Bass Ponds last week.
In this picture the male is on the top with a blue abdomen while the female is below with a red abdomen. The reproductive organs of both sexes are located near the end of the abdomen, however the males actually have 2 sets. Sperm is produced by the reproductive organ at the back of the abdomen and then is transferred to a reproductive organ located just in front of the abdomen. The female then places her reproductive organ on the males front organ and that is where the sperm is transferred. The male then places his abdomen on top of her head which she grasps with her feet. This gives the couple stability while the mating procedure is taking place and even allows them to fly as a single unit.
I am hoping to add a lot more butterfly and dragonfly pictures soon, if the weather decides to cooperate but if you really need a dragonfly fix check out this blog that I found on Dragons and Damsels in Malaysia. It is a very good blog with a lot of great pics so I would definitely recommend checking it out.

Another trip to Anderson Lake and then off to Wood Lake

Wednesday I helped out at the Raptor Center after work so I did not get a chance to go out and do any shooting. Thursday I decided to head back to Anderson Lake Park to try and get some more pictures of the black-bellied whistling-duck. When I first arrived at the park I went and checked out the pond where the duck had been hanging out. The duck was not around only a couple of birders. Unfortunately the MOU list server was down that day, so I could not get any updates on whether people had still been seeing the duck, so I asked the other birders if any of them had seen it and was told that they had not had any luck. So I decided to go check out the lake. There were some flocks of waterfowl on the lake but they were on the far side and consisted mostly of mallards and Canadian geese from what I could see, definitely no whistling duck. I followed the path around and it took me back to the pond so I checked out the path that lead to the shore. I did not see the duck but I did spot a meadowhawk landing. It was very strange to be shooting pictures of a dragonfly on November 1st in Minnesota. I also spotted an American tree sparrow in one of the small trees lining that part of the pond.
But still no duck. So I decided to go back to the other side of the pond where I could stand on the hill and see the whole pond a bit better. I ran into another birder at the overlook and we began to converse about birding and photography. It is always cool to talk with someone like this who has been an active birder for a long time. We stood there and talked, while we looked for the duck, for about an hour and a half. I did not get another view of the duck but I had fun and learned a few new things. We did get a nice fly by from a red-tailed hawk.A little after 4:00 pm we decided that the duck had prolly moved on so we both decided to leave. It was still light so I decided to stop at Wood Lake Nature Center on my way home. As usual I checked out the trees on the shore by the visitors center first. This is always a good place to find passerines. On this day I found an American tree sparrow and a black-capped chickadee.
Further off in the woods I spotted a couple of American robins.
On the trail I found another meadowhawk. This was my last Minnesota dragonfly on 2007.On the lake where the usual mallards and Canadian geese with a few American wigeons mixed in.There was also a flock of about 20 or so American coots.I was getting hungry so I decided to take off but on my way home I found another red-tailed hawk scouting the roadside from a light poll.