Yesterday was a cool gray (heavy overcast) day which usually means low activity for odonates. Nevertheless, I donned my green wellies, added a layer of woodsman’s cologne and\u00a0 headed down to the beaver swamp behind the house about 3:30 PM.<\/p>\n
When I arrived a spent some time at the edge of the woods watching both the small patch of open water and the large patch of wet grassy marsh without seeing any activity. Eventually, I spied a dragonfly patrolling the open water. Deciding to brave the swamp proper, I headed off into the grassed and sedges lying between me and the open water.<\/p>\n
As I moved though the waist- to chest-high grasses, I stirred up all sorts of insects that must have been just “hanging out” conserving energy. There were at least three species of damselflies present. I also stirred up two teneral meadow hawks (I only got photos of one though).<\/p>\n
Lesson learned… observation form a distance tells only a small part of the story; one needs to immerse\u00a0 oneself in the environment to get the “complete” story.<\/p>\n
There were also two different type of moths present —\u00a0 a small orange one and an even smaller cream colored one — no photos of the latter as they pretty much stayed down near the ground where the tangle of vegetation makes it impossible to get a clear line of sight.<\/p>\n
After photographing critters among the grasses, I finally arrived at the edge of the open water where I spent some time watching two or three dragonflies (all the same species I think, but exactly which one, I can not say!) patrolling and hunting. Not once did I see any of them perch so there was no possibility of photographs.<\/p>\n
As the afternoon wore on, the ode activity diminished. It was about six o’clock when I called it quits.<\/p>\n
So here are the “keepers”:<\/p>\n
[nggallery id=65]<\/p>\n
The first image is one of those “accidents” where I pushed the shutter release just as the critter took off… most of the time I get a frame containing a wonderful study of a twig or blade of grass (which I promptly delete)! This time my Yesterday was a cool gray (heavy overcast) day which usually means low activity for odonates. Nevertheless, I donned my green wellies, added a layer of woodsman’s cologne and\u00a0 headed down to the beaver swamp behind the house about 3:30 PM. When I arrived a spent some time at the edge of the woods watching both […]<\/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":[5,28,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-odontates","category-other-insects","category-the-new-yard-environs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558","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=558"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":565,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions\/565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}timing<\/del> luck was better. What do folks think? Is it interesting enough to keep?<\/p>\n
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