Earlier today I did a posting that discussed perching behavior and featured shots of two male Ashy Clubtail dragonflies (Phanogomphus lividus) that I had photographed last Thursday on a rocky area along a stream in Prince William County, Virginia. As I was going through my shots from this past Saturday, I came upon this image of a female Ashy Clubtail that serves as a nice complement to the photos in the earlier posting.
The most obvious differences is that this female dragonfly chose to perch on this interrupted fern that was much higher off of the ground. Note, however, that like her male counterpart, she is perching horizontally and not grasping onto a stalk or a branch, as some other dragonflies are prone to do. This image gives you a partial view of the terminal appendages at the tip of her abdomen (the “tail”) that make it clear that this is a female. If you compare those appendage with the same area of the males, you may be able to tell that they are different.
There are other ways to tell the gender of dragonflies, but I will save those explanations for a later posting, or leave them to my dragonfly-hunting friend Walter Sanford, who is much more of an expert on this topic than I am.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
Amazing! Her wings seem to disappear in the shape of the fern. Wow!
Very nice Mike! We are finally getting lots of Dragonflies here. It seems it was a slow start to our Dragonflies showing up here!
We have pretty much finished with our spring species and many of the summer ones are here now, like the Common Whitetail, Eastern Amberwing, and Blue Dasher.