Location, Location, Location!
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On June 10, 2015, while walking the brief portion of the trail that joins Roaches Pond park with the paved trail along the McIntosh Run, I happened upon some of my first dragonflies of the season. What was interesting about this encounter was that I found three different species sharing the same dead brush along the sunny east side of the trail. The first, which I think is a teneral belted whiteface, Leucorrhinia proxima, attracted me by being disturbed as I approached the spot along the trail. It's movement, in turn, disturbed a second dragonfly... |
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...which subsequently landed on a sapling beside the dead brush. This is a "common" baskettail, Epitheca cynosura. A side note: I dislike—intensely—the use of abundance measures such as "common" in the colloquial (there's my dislike of that word "common" again) names of organisms...it serves no useful purpose as a descriptor. Now that I've got that off my chest, once my eyes were opened to the presence of these two species of dragonflies, I promptly noticed a third species there represented by... |
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...not one, but two, freshly emerged individuals of the springtime darner, Basiaeschna janata. The most intriguing thing, besides finding these three species together in the same spot at the same time? This spot along the trail is nowhere near water and is about equidistant from both the pond and the run. Still, as we all know, and as these dragonflies had obviously figured out, life is better on the sunny side—it's all about location, location, location! |
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