Whenever I can, I like to give a sense of the environment in which I find a dragonfly by including natural elements in the image. For example, I really like the fern in this photo of a female Painted Skimmer dragonfly (Libellula semifasciata) that I spotted last Thursday while wandering about in Prince William County.
Many of you know that I enjoy taking photos at Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, a grassland and wetland habitat at the confluence of the Potomac and Occoquan Rivers where I am able to find an amazing assortment of birds, animals, and insects. This past month, however, I have been spending a lot of time in a different habitat.
I have traded the coastal plains for a hilly, forested area in Prince William County and replaced the broad river expanses with small mountain creeks and streams. Why? Many of the early spring dragonflies are found only in very specific habitats and the area that I have been exploring meets the requirements of several of those species.
It is difficult to describe these “new” areas, so I have included a couple of photos to give you a few indications of what I see and feel there. The second photo shows a relatively flat area adjacent to a stream. The forest floor is covered completely in ferns and dragonflies can sometimes be found perching in that vegetation, as you can see in the first photo.
The final photo shows one of the streams that I love to explore. Sometimes there will be dragonflies flying over the water or perching on the banks. I don’t want to give you the false impression, though, that there are lots of dragonflies here. My sightings are infrequent, but it is easy for me to spend hours on end in places like this—any photos that I manage to take are a bonus.
Last Saturday, for example, I explored for little over six hours and covered 10.8 miles (17 km) on a day when I knew the weather was too cool and cloudy to find many dragonflies. Yeah, I am a bit of a fanatic sometimes.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
It’s a beautiful area, Mike, but I don’t know how you spot a dragonfly in there. You must be focused 🙂
Great shot Mike, nothing is flying here because of the weather. We still have to be patient.
Beautiful and wonderful shots. You are so clever recognising all these different dragonflies.
Looking very lush and peaceful there, Mike!
It was definitely peaceful there, Ellen, just me and nature, as I like it. 🙂
Enjoy Mike. Beautiful.
Thanks, John.
Very nice. I always like to see the local environment.
Likewise to Ted, and Mike I was surprised to see such a swathe of ferny ground cover in your middle shot. We also have large areas of fern in some parts of our bush but that looks generally drier, different fern species, and it’s rare for us to encounter a big flat glade like that – our land generally being very much of the up-and-down, broken-up kind of terrain. The debris in a stream is a familiar sight to me! Beautiful dragonfly and landscape shots, thank you.
I was following the stream as it made its way through a small valley. sometimes there were relatively steep slopes on one side of the stream or the other, while at other times it opened wider and we had the kind of wide swath of ferns that you saw in the middle photo. I am not used to shooting landscape-type shots like these, but it does help to give others a sense of the habitat. I think that things will dry out some in the upcoming months, but right now things are green and pretty lush.
No alligators or water birds here the streams, Ted, though I did see a few Canada Geese at a little pond and occasional vulture.
Very nice series of images Mike! Enjoyed seeing them!
Very nice Mike! Looks like a great place to photograph!