Homegrown dragonflies
May. 15th, 2012 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
centuryplantI 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.
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Date: 2012-05-16 12:52 am (UTC)Do you mind if I show these pics to T? He LOVES dragonflies.
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Date: 2012-05-16 12:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-16 01:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-16 04:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-17 08:29 pm (UTC)