Damsels and Dragons

What a photo op! A person couldn't help but get keeper Dragonflies in Flight photos!
 
Late season dragonflies. At this point, just about all the dragonflies are done and dusted for the year. A straggler or two may still survive at this late date but their days are numbers, probably on one hand… One of the last species that I saw flying around the pond and canal edges at Nisqually NWR was a meadowhawk, probably a white-faced meadowhawk. Adults of this species hunt from perches. It has a very wide distribution across the U.S. and Southern Canada.
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In the fall, paddle-tailed darners actively patrolled the edges of the shrub-choked canals. While I would hope for an individual to land just to make for easier photographs, they stayed in flight. But if you take enough pictures you can get lucky sometimes.
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But during one visit in early October, another visitor pointed out one lying along the boardwalk, presumably on its last legs. That did make taking a few photographs easier for sure.
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Steve
 
One of the great things about night fishing in the desert on a hot late spring evening (besides the ticks, bats, rattlers and muskrat holes) is watching the dragonfly nymphs latch onto a reed and crawl up to hatch out in the dark. Wow!!

I'll cheat and repost this one from the backyard wildlife thread until I can get more photos of these amazing creatures
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What a shot!!! .......... just can not imagine how one accomplishes that.
 
Time to bump? Sorry, no colorful adults to be seen yet. So many great shots in this thread too.
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Today a male Cardinal Meadowhawk visited my deck and spent half an hour chasing insects until the neighbor's cottonwood began filling the air with fluff. The Meadowhawk made a half-dozen sorties after tiny bits of floating cotton, then left to find a less fluffy and confusing hunting ground.

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Today a male Cardinal Meadowhawk visited my deck and spent half an hour chasing insects until the neighbor's cottonwood began filling the air with fluff. The Meadowhawk made a half-dozen sorties after tiny bits of floating cotton, then left to find a less fluffy and confusing hunting ground.

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WOW!!!!
 
Today a male Cardinal Meadowhawk visited my deck and spent half an hour chasing insects until the neighbor's cottonwood began filling the air with fluff. The Meadowhawk made a half-dozen sorties after tiny bits of floating cotton, then left to find a less fluffy and confusing hunting ground.

View attachment 157455
That's a great shot. I was just about to get one when.....if lifted off, focus changed, and all i got was a blurry red butt on the left.
 

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Nisqually NWR: 19 June 2025. Seduced by other alluring locations, I hadn't been to Nisqually in six weeks. But I dropped by last week to see what was happening. I did catch some good bird pics, but the most alluring photographic subjects were insects, especially pollinators on Himalayan blackberry flowers and others just in the area. Several Pacific forktail damselflies were using the blackberry leaves as convenient perches to attack midges emerging from the nearby freshwater marsh. Like other damselflies, they have a relatively bulky thorax which houses their powerful flight muscles and a long thin abdomen. In this species, the abdomen is black, tipped in blue in terminal segments (2 segments in males, one in females). I saw mostly males (aqua-blue lower thorax and four blue dots on the upper thorax).
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Females can be quite variable in their coloration and their coloration can change as they age. A female will have the same thin black abdomen as a male, but with blue on only one of the terminal abdominal segments. In many females, the thorax is white with a thin black dorsal thoracic stripe.
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Steve
 
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