{"id":3090,"date":"2015-07-13T18:15:53","date_gmt":"2015-07-13T22:15:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/?p=3090"},"modified":"2015-07-13T18:02:00","modified_gmt":"2015-07-13T22:02:00","slug":"ode-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/?p=3090","title":{"rendered":"Ode Tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday (Sunday, 12 Jul), Joan and I made a hot, sunny trip (of about three miles round trip) on the Connecticut River in Claremont, NH<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Joan was on a rare plant hunt for NEWFS<\/a>. I, of course, was interested in big river odes!<\/p>\n

Joan did not find the plants she was looking for. I watched two teneral dragonflies drown!<\/p>\n

The most common ode we saw were, I believe, powdered dancers. Most were single males patrolling out over the river. But I did see four or five pairs ovipositing in a small patch of emergent vegetation. I have no photos of them since it is simple not possible to make photos at high magnification while sitting in a boat on a relatively fast moving river. \u00a0That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!<\/p>\n

At one point, I noticed a odd fluttering movement on some emergent vegetation at the rivers edge. I headed over to discover a damaged and teneral dragonfly. I pulled my boat ashore and spent some time observing and photographing this “fellow” (see the first three photos below). Twice, while I watched, the wake of a passing boat washed the critter off the stem it was holding but each time it climbed back up. Notice the crumpled wing, despite much fluttering of wings at times, I suspect that this individual was never going to fly and was, thus, doomed.<\/p>\n

After some minutes of my watching this individual, Joan came along and pointed out another teneral dragonfly about ten feet further upstream from the first. I headed over to photograph the second individual who was clinging to a stem of grass within inches of the water\u00a0 (see the second three photos below).<\/p>\n

After a few minutes of photographing this new individual, another boat (with its concomitant wake) went by and washed it off its perch; the current carried it quickly downstream. I went back to the place I first stopped and, alas, there was only a very soggy clump of vegetation to be found.<\/p>\n

I packed up the ode rig and headed on upstream to the spot where Joan was searching for plants on the back. I beached the boat and began to hunt unsuccessfully for a powdered dancer to photograph. I did, however, \u00a0find a small number of very nondescript brown damselflies which I think are female dusky dancers. \u00a0At one point Joan came by bearing a small piece of vegetation to which an exuvia was clinging. I was able to prop this up between two river stones and make a nice photo of it as well.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday (Sunday, 12 Jul), Joan and I made a hot, sunny trip (of about three miles round trip) on the Connecticut River in Claremont, NH. Joan was on a rare plant hunt for NEWFS. I, of course, was interested in big river odes! Joan did not find the plants she was looking for. I watched […]<\/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":[5,111],"tags":[13,12],"class_list":["post-3090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-odontates","category-summer","tag-damselflies","tag-dragonflies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3090","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=3090"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3101,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3090\/revisions\/3101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}