Mike Powell

As I was exploring the edge of the same small pond where I photographed the newt featured in yesterday’s blog posting, I spotted my first damselfly of the season. Damselflies and dragonflies both belong to the order of flying insects known as Odonata. Damselflies tend to be smaller and slimmer that dragonflies and most damselflies hold their wings above their bodies when at rest, unlike dragonflies that perch with wings extended.

Identification of this damselfly was somewhat difficult for me. On the one hand, I saw the broken shoulder stripe that looks like an exclamation point, which suggests that this is a Fragile Forktail damselfly (Ischnura posita). On the other hand, my identification guide states that there is no blue at the tip of the abdomen (the “tail”) of the Fragile Forktail, making me think it might be an Eastern Forktail.

I posted the photo to a Facebook forum called Virginia Odonata and one of the experts there made the following comment, “This is quite an unusual Forktail. Easterns rarely have the split shoulder stripe, but I am still inclined toward Fragile even though the amount of blue on S9 is unusual.”  For your information, naturalists divide the abdomen of a dragonfly into ten segments and you start counting from the thorax area (the upper body), so S9 is the penultimate segment.

When it comes to identifying birds and insects, I have grown accustomed to living with some degree of uncertainty. Even experts will sometimes disagree, particularly if there is only a photo from a single angle, which was the case with this damselfly.

For me, the precision of my identification is not critically important—I can enjoy the beauty of this little damselfly without knowing its name. For the second day in a row, I am reminded of Shakespeare, who famously wrote in Romeo and Juliet, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.”

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.