Lower Crab Creek: Twelve-spotted Skimmer

We had a great time visiting Lower Crab Creek a couple weeks ago.  Here's what it looks like there.



One of the other species we enjoyed at Lower Crab Creek was the Twelve-spotted Skimmer.  Here's an example:



This species looks a lot like the Eight-spotted Skimmer but, as one might imagine, it has four extra dark spots – one at the tip of each of its long thin wings.

This is a young male, and it still shows yellow striping along the edges of the abdomen.  As it matures, the abdomen will become pruinose whitish-blue, and the yellow stripes will be hard, if not impossible, to see.  The yellow stripes remain visible at all ages in females.

Finally, notice that the front two legs are folded up and tucked behind the head.  You can see those legs just behind the eyes – in fact, the small white spots you see there are actually the "knees" of the legs; that is, the folded joints in the middle of the leg.

Butchart Gardens

A couple days ago, Betsy and I visited Butchart Gardens on the way back from our cruise to Alaska.



It's a lovely place, and the weather was perfect.  Flowers everywhere, of course.







Many darners were flying over the open grassy lawns, but no other odonates were seen for a while – until we came to the "Star Fountain," shown above.  There we saw lots of Tule Bluets, including one that liked to perch on the begonias:





Notice the almost equal-width bands of black and blue on the abdomen, with the black bands actually a bit wider than the blue ones.  The Northern and Boreal Bluets differ in having mostly blue on the abdomen, with small black rings separating them.

In addition, we saw a darner fly in and land on one of the "frogs" that shoots out streams of water.  Here it is:



It's clear that this is a female, due to its overall brownish and greenish color, and the expanded tip of the abdomen that holds the ovipositor.  Females are generally a bit more difficult to identify than males, but in this case the identification was easy.  Notice the small "bump" – or tubercle – below segment 1 of the abdomen.  Here's a better view of the bump:



The interesting thing about this bump is that it's a distinctive field mark for the female Blue-eyed Darner.  None of the other mosaic darners in our area have this bump.  It's a good field mark to look for, though it's not always as easily seen as it is in this view.

Lower Crab Creek, Dragonfly Eden: Emma's Dancer

Betsy and I went to Lower Crab Creek in Eastern Washington a few days ago.  The dragonfly activity there is astounding – dragonflies are definitely the most common form of wildlife in the area.  The location is about 4 miles east of the tiny town of Beverly, Washington, on Road 17 SW.  Here's a map showing the site:

The setting is spectacular, as you can see from the background of this picture of Betsy looking for dragonflies in the bushes:

We saw a number of beautiful species there, including some we don't see in Puget Sound, and a few that were new for us.  I'll start with a damselfly species that we've seen before, Emma's Dancer, but never in these numbers.  Here's the male of the species, easily identified by its lovely lavender color, and blue-tipped abdomen:

The female is a tannish-brown color:

What a beautiful damselfly.  It was so nice to have them everywhere we looked.