Heart-shaped wheel

 At the beaver pond today, the bluets were busy:

Boreal bluet, on hardhack leaf.

Mating pair, the male above, the female below. And her shadow.

With the damselfly clan, which includes the bluets, the female takes an active part in the mating game. (As opposed, for example, to spiders, where the female repels the male, and may eat him.) It's a four-step process; he prepares himself, transferring sperm from the back end of his abdomen to a pocket at the front; she grows a batch of eggs. Then he goes in search of a female, and grabs her neck with specialized claspers at the tail end of his abdomen. She, if she so chooses, then folds herself in half, to attach her tail end to the prepared sperm pocket, fertilizing her eggs.

They can fly around in this position (they call it the mating wheel); I saw two flying couples this afternoon.

When she's ready to lay her eggs, the male accompanies her, still holding her neck, as she visits the underwater plants where her babies will grow. She may need his protection; there's always the risk that she may get trapped underwater and drown before the eggs are all in safe places.

At the pond, these little blue arrows dart around, rarely stopping, always in a hurry. It's a hectic time of life for them, this being an adult: they've got a lot of egg-laying to do, and only a few weeks to do it in.

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En la laguna de los castores hoy, las libélulas estaban muy ocupadas:

1. Azulilla de estanque boreal, Enallagama boreale, en una hoja de Spiraea douglasii.
2. Una pareja, el macho arriba, la hembra (y su sombra) abajo.

Entre los caballitos del diablo, incluyendo a los del género Enallagma, la hembra toma parte activa en el proceso de apareamiento. (En oposición, por ejemplo, con las arañas, donde la hembra rechaza al macho o hasta lo come.) Es un proceso con cuatro etapas: (1) el macho se prepara, transferiendo esperma desde el extremo posterior de su abdomen hacia un órgano cerca del céfalotorax; la hembra produce un grupo de huevos. (2) Luego el sale en busca de una hembra, y la sujeta por la nuca con unos apéndices al propósito al final del abdomen. Entonces (3), ella, si le parece bien, se pliega y adhiere su extremo posterior al órgano copulador del macho, y así se fecundan sus huevos.

Pueden volar en esta postura; lo llaman el vuelo nupcial. Esta tarde vi dos parejas en el aire.

(4) Cuando la hembra va en busca de plantas subacuáticas donde pondrá los huevos, el macho la acompaña, deteniéndola todavía por la nuca, protegiéndola, pues siempre está en peligro de ahogarse en este momento.

En la laguna, estas flechitas azules se agitan, casi sin parar, volando a toda velocidad. Es una temporada de actividad frenética, esta etapa de vida adulta; tienen que implantar yoda la próxima generación y muy poco tiempo les queda de vida.

Elusive blues

Paradise Meadows. The meadow is a fen; the water lies just below the surface of the soil, breaking out here and there in a series of ponds bordered by buckbeans. Where the land rises around the rim of the meadow, peat-brown creeks wind their way down to the flats, chuckling as they go.

Paradise Meadows Loop trail, going and coming.

Prime country for dragonflies and their kin. Fat dragonflies mating over the buckbeans. Just above the green of the grasses, sky-blue needles flashing and disappearing. We take many photos of places where they were a half-second ago. A few times, the camera captures one, more or less.

Boreal bluet, Enallagama boreale

Blurry bluet and its shadow on the boardwalk.

We chased flittering orange butterflies, with no luck. Nearly back at trailhead, this blue one consented to pause for a moment, dancing in place. In the photo, only the weeds stayed still; check out those vibrating antennae!

Blue butterfly, possibly Spring Azure, Celastrina lucia.

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Paradise Meadows, Las Praderas de Paraíso. La pradera es un pantano; el agua reposa casi en la superficie del suelo o saliendo a la vista en una serie de lagunas rodeadas de tréboles de agua. Donde el terreno se eleva alrededor del pantano, riachuelos con agua del color café rojizo de turba corren cantando hacia las lagunas.

Foto #1: El segundo sendero de las Praderas de Paraíso, con sus paseos entablados.

Este es terreno perfecto para las libélulas y los caballitos del diablo. Alrededor de los tréboles de agua, libélulas grandes interpretaban sus bailes nupciales. En el aire sobre lo verde de la pradera, los caballitos del diablo, al parecer agujas del color de los cielos, brillantes, destellaban y desaparecían. Sacamos muchas fotos de sitios donde se habían detenido hacia medio segundo. De vez en cuando la cámara logra capturar uno. Más o menos.

#2: Un caballito del diablo, Enagallama boreale.

#3: Un caballito borroso, y su sombra en el paseo entablado.

#4: Perseguimos mariposas anaranjada, sin suerte. Pero esta mariposa azul se detuvo por un instante entre las hierbas. Por un instante apenas, y eso sin dejar de bailar. ¡Fíjate en esas antenas que no han dejado de vibrar!

Flashes of blue and green light

A few more Odonata from Reifel Island.

(We were there in mid-afternoon, on a baking hot day. It's not a good time for birding, but it sure was for bugs of all types!)

Male bluet. There must have been hundreds of these. Every photo taken over the water had many tiny flashes of blue, as they zipped back and forth, rarely stopping.

A female of the same species, not nearly as gaudy as her mate.

Skimmer, possibly the four-spotted skimmer, pausing briefly on dried grass.

And a sad story. There were many very small damselflies along the edge of the water, too small and too fast to get a good look at them. I got the impression of colourless wings vibrating at great speed, and not much else, until one landed right in front of me.

Unfortunately, the chosen landing spot was booby-trapped, and within seconds, a spider dropped down and sunk her fangs into the damselfly. It struggled wildly, twisting and shaking, only entangling itself even more. And the one half-decent photo I got shows more of the spider than of the fly.

The spider is another of the cross spiders. Very happy, not cross at all.

The damselfly has a black back, greenish-yellow underside, green and yellow eyes and legs. The wings are distinctive; just a cheese-cloth weave with a tiny brownish diamond near the tip. I have submitted it to BugGuide, without much hope of an identification, but you never know; those people are geniuses!

Winged heart

At the edge of a tiny puddle of a lake, the dragonflies and bluets were dancing. This pair of bluets flew over to where I was looking for frogs (Plop! Plop!) and perched right in front of me.

The blue male was doing the steering; he already had the female firmly held by the back of her neck with the graspers at the end of his abdomen. She came along like a trailer on a hitch.

Landing. She's still trying to fly.

She rests, hanging loose.

He gets himself well anchored ...

... and pulls her back to his level.

She curls her abdomen forward.

He has already pre-loaded the sperm bank on the bottom of his thorax, from the genital organ at the tip of his abdomen. Now she has to get her own genital opening into position.

Almost there.

Contact! And they make a two-tone heart together.

I shifted position, getting a firmer foothold, and the winged heart flew away. She will lay her eggs now in a plant underwater. He will hold on, staying dry himself, keeping her safe, until she is done.

(And another heart for Clytie.)

The young and the restless of Cougar Creek

The dragonflies were out in force at Cougar Creek Park yesterday, mostly in couples. They were dressed in shimmering black and blue, or dazzling reds; some wore white, some brown. One had green eyes, and another was resplendent in silver and silky sheers.

We managed to catch a few of them at rest.

A common whitetail male, Libellula (Plathemis) lydia, with a blue tail.

The tail is not white, and I wondered about that. I found the explanation on BugGuide: he's a young male whose tail has not reached its full brilliance. I like the blue better, but then, I'm not a whitetail dragonfly, so my opinion doesn't count.

Another dragonfly that I saw and got only a couple of shots at (although the camera couldn't find it to focus), was almost invisible. A big dragonfly, but with transparent wings, and a shimmery, silvery, mirror-like pale body. The camera just looked straight through it, and it shows up as a shiny fog over the background. I looked everywhere for a transparent dragonfly, with no luck until I happened across it with the whitetails on BugGuide. It's a female whitetail, just hatched from its nymph stage.

This is the BugGuide photo; mine are hopeless.

It looks all weird and shimmering because it is teneral, which means that it has just emerged from the nymphal stage, and its parts haven't fully hardened yet. (Mark Fox)

The same male, but here he looks like he has 8 wings. The light was very bright, and he was on almost white clay, so the shadows are almost as vivid as the wings.

A tiny, green-eyed bluet resting on a branch.

There were other bluets, as well, dark-eyed ones with dotted-line abdomens. And many of those big black and blue darners. None of them stopped their mating frenzy long enough for us to get close.

A Cherry-faced Meadowhawk, Sympetrum internum.

A meadowhawk and a whitetail, caught in the same photo.

Moment under the sun

It's midsummer on Reifel Island, and in spite of the spotty, off-and-on, sort-of-summer weather we've been treated to this year, luxuriant vegetation lines the waterways. Head-high grasses, brilliant green leaves, juicy berries and little green apples, mounds and fields of flowers in glowing pink, yellow, white, and thistle-purple, drifting seed parachutes; a new glory appears at each turn of the pathway.

Along one of the inner trails, swarms of skinny bluets darted from thistle to grass to loosestrife, back to the grass to rest, briefly.

Bluets, about 1 1/2 inches long. Possibly Enallagma sp.

I couldn't get close enough to them to see clearly; in all the movement of grasses blowing in the wind, tree branches waving overhead, they somehow always noticed my cautious easing forward and darted away.

There were two colours. The males are patterned in crisp black and neon blue, females in neat brownish-black, glinting green when the light strikes them at just the right angle. I didn't see any mating couples; it's the season for love, but they would have been on the far side of the greenery, at the water's edge.

I had given up on seeing any bluets up close, and was turning to leave when I saw this:

A spider in the act of subduing a female bluet.

Zooming in. She is still moving, feebly, but her head is hanging down. I don't recognize the spider.

And in the grass behind them, the dance went on.

Update: Rebecca in the Woods has posted an amazing video of a spider wrapping up a big dragonfly. Go watch it!