Calico Pennants by the Pansy Landing Road

[centuryplant]

Last June I decided to try driving along the St. Croix River on the Wisconsin side, stopping at boat landings to see if I could find any new species of clubtail. By the time I got to the Pansy Landing, up past Danbury, it was already shaded out and nobody was flying. But on the road leading there I'd noticed dozens of baskettails filling the sky, and then on the way back I started to see little flashes of yellow and red in the bushes, so I had to stop. For no reason I can figure out, this stretch of road is an incredibly good site for Calico Pennants -- everywhere you look, there's one.

It's also the best site I've ever found for Dermacentor variabilis, the American Dog Tick. This year on our way back from Duluth, Pamela and I stopped just for a few minutes to see if the pennants were still there this year -- they were -- and during that brief glance around, we took on more than a dozen ticks, some of which had apparently boarded the parked car during the few moments the doors were open. Luckily dog ticks are hapless and take forever to decide where they are going to bite you, so usually it's just a matter of being crawled around on, not actually consumed. It's worth it because there are no trees on the west side of road, so the sun and the dragonflies both stay out late, making it possible to take photos like this:

And this:

I noticed some pennants perching on barbed wire on the west side of the road, but the bushes along the fence were too thick to get far through, and the way up to it wasn't exactly clear either. I don't remember how many times I found a path uphill, only to reach my subject just as it decided to move to another part of the fence. Then I would go back to the road, scrape the ticks off my legs with a piece of bark, and try again. I never did get a satisfactory close-up, but maybe this is better anyway.

Shooting from directly in front of the dragonfly gives an odd head-on-a-stick effect.

This was one of the last ones still visible as the sun set.

This one was well down in the vegetation, and had probably settled for the night. Fortunately the air was still, or that thin stem would have been whipping back and forth and I would never have gotten the picture.

Comments

[kore]

When he sees these T is going to FLIP. I like the last one best.