Today was a beautiful early fall day and I could not resist the urge to wander down to “our” beaver swamp late this afternoon.<\/p>\n
Noticing all of the nice clouds, I tossed my wide angle lens and polarizing filter in my pocket as I headed out the door. Thus, I can actually show those who have not (yet) been here a photo of the place where I have whiled away many enjoyable hours in pursuit of odes over\u00a0 the past two summers.<\/p>\n
The ode season is definitely winding down here. There were a dozen or so large odes (darners, most likely) aloft out over the meadow and I watched a couple of female darners ovipositing at the edge of the pond.\u00a0 I noted two or three spreadwings along the edge of the woods and that was about it… except for one rare opportunity that I caught!<\/p>\n
Darners are large, spectacular dragonflies that are frustrating to photograph… they rarely perch! However, every once in a great awhile one finds them perched and you get an opportunity!<\/p>\n
I was wandering slowly along the edge of the meadow when I flushed a darner mating wheel\u00a0 out of the grass. This is a fairly rare, maybe two or three times a summer, event in itself. Usually the pair flies off and that’s it. You loose track of them, they land high up in a tree or you flush them a second time trying to get a good angle photographically, et cetera, et cetera. Or as Joan would say… “excuses, excuses”!<\/p>\n
This time the mating pair landed about ten feet up on the trunk of a nearby tree; a little high to be ideal but one takes what nature provides. I took the extension tube off the 70-300 mm lens and was able photograph them for twenty-five minutes (according to the meta-data). The show ended when the couple parted ways; presumably she headed to the pond to begin ovipositing. They are either Canada Darners or Green-striped Darners… I can’t decide. [UPDATE: Thanks to my friend Kevin and the helpful folks on the Northeast Odonates mailing list<\/a> (who all agree), we can say that these are Canada Darners.]<\/p>\n I wandered for another hour or so before the sun dipped below the ridge and I headed home. In that interval, I saw a couple more spreadwings ,always at the edge of the woods, and a few grasshoppers among the marsh grasses.<\/p>\n [scrollGallery id=165 autoscroll = false width = 600 height = 600\u00a0 useCaptions = true]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today was a beautiful early fall day and I could not resist the urge to wander down to “our” beaver swamp late this afternoon. Noticing all of the nice clouds, I tossed my wide angle lens and polarizing filter in my pocket as I headed out the door. Thus, I can actually show those who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[93,5,28],"tags":[13,12,31,56],"class_list":["post-1398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-landscapes-2","category-odontates","category-other-insects","tag-damselflies","tag-dragonflies","tag-insects","tag-landscapes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1398"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1406,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1398\/revisions\/1406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}