Homegrown dragonflies

[centuryplant]

I saw my first non-migrant dragonflies of the year on May 10th at Murphy-Hanrehan Park Reserve. This is early, though not quite as early as the warm spring had led me to hope. Emergence may only be a week or so ahead of schedule.

I only saw one of these Spiny Baskettails, but luckily he perched long enough for me to get this photo.

Fresh new Dot-Tailed Whitefaces were fluttering around in the short grass at the edge of the parking lot. I didn't find any Frosted Whitefaces, though they're similar enough to Dot-Taileds as juveniles that I could have missed a few in the crowd.

A cropped version showing the ommatidia in the eye. The Canon 100mm f/2.8L is a very very nice lens.

Male Eastern Forktail damselflies have a green and black thorax, usually with a straight green stripe down each shoulder. Sometimes, as on this one, the stripe is divided and looks like an exclamation point or two widely spaced dots. The books call this a rare variation, but at Murphy it seems to be very common -- about a third of the males I got close looks at had a more or less divided shoulder stripe. I'll have to check and see if that's true again next year.