Oak Flat Mine Pond

Before leaving Arizona, Betsy and I visited one of our favorite locations—Oak Flat. This is a nice wildlife area, with a couple ponds and a campground. There is also some mining going on at Oak Flat—in fact, one spot we like a lot is the Oak Flat Mine Pond. We worry that this pond will vanish one day, as a result of the mining operations, but so far it has survived, and always provides lots of odonate activity.

Here's the location of Oak Flat, just a bit north and east of the town of Superior:



The pond is smallish and shallow, with lots of shoreline vegetation. Here's a view of it:



On this trip, we had a nice view of a Roseate Skimmer:



What a beautiful dragonfly. The skimmer was fighting over the perch with a Variegated Meadowhawk, who also thought that this was an ideal perch for surveying the shoreline. Here's the meadowhawk on the same perch, after displacing the skimmer:



They took turns displacing one another.

There were lots of Variegated Meadowhawks at Oak Flat. They really are a prolific species. Here's another one at Oak Flat.



They generally perch above the ground on vegetation, but are comfortable with landing on bare spots on the shore as well. In this view, you can really appreciate the color pattern of the abdomen, as well as the yellow color along the leading edge of the wings.

One final treat from Oak Flat on this visit was a Plateau Dragonlet. We've only seen this species a couple times before, and at only one location—Tortilla Flat—so it was completely unexpected to see one here. Here's a view of the one individual we saw:



Notice the dark head and thorax, in addition to the blue abdomen with a dark tip.

This individual was vying with other insects for perching sites. Take a look at the dragonlet in the following photo:



Do you see two other insects on either side of the dragonlet, perched atop their own stems? The next photo points them out:



In addition, there are a couple of these insects below the dragonlet on the same stem. The dragonfly and these other insects were constantly interacting with one another, though, of course, the dragonfly was always the one to get his way.