Great Blue Skimmer

[centuryplant]

pameladean and I saw this dragonfly last week at St. Croix State Park. There's a narrow dirt road on the east side of the park that runs down through a wetland where Small Purple Fringed Orchids bloom. The orchids used to grow right by the road so you could photograph them easily, but lately there always seems to be standing water on both sides of the road, and the orchids grow further back. I don't want to trample up their habitat, and I don't trust the mud under that water to bear my weight anyway, so I don't try to get close. We got out of the car anyway because I wanted to photograph a White-Faced Meadowhawk sitting on a dead plant stem over the water -- I didn't have a good photo of that species for the county. A little further down the road was this big blue-white dragonfly, which I thought at the time was a Pondhawk, though I did notice that it was awfully large. I took a few photos while Pamela looked at the orchids, and then -- since the road at that point is a single lane and there's no way to pass a car parked on it -- we moved on, and promptly saw a Scarlet Tanager, which seemed much more interesting than a Pondhawk.

When I got home and looked at the photos, it finally dawned on me that the blue dragonfly wasn't a Pondhawk at all. It was a Great Blue Skimmer, and my excuse for not knowing what one looks like is that they don't occur in Minnesota. At least, no one knew they did until now. This is the current range map for the species from odonatacentral.org:

That one green dot all by itself up on the Minnesota border is our sighting -- about 300 miles from the nearest one in southeastern Wisconsin. I have no idea how this dragonfly got here. If it's a stray, it made a hell of a trip. Or maybe there's been a small population here all along and no one knew about it.

I really need to sit down and study the identification of dragonfly species that the books say don't occur here, since it turns out that the dragonflies don't read the books.