During the summer it seems like dragonflies are everywhere, perching prominently in plain sight in all kinds of environments, but this early in the season there are a whole lot fewer of them and the ones that are around are relatively hard to find. Last week, though, I was blessed to encounter quite a few Ashy Clubtail dragonflies (Phanogomphus lividus) while I was exploring a creek in Prince William County, Virginia.
The Dragonflies of Northern Virginia website, one of my favorite on-line dragonfly resources, described well the environment in which to find this species. “To find Ashies, look for clean, stable, rocky forest streams and then search out the closest sunny clearing, stream-side meadow or sunlit path. Like Common Whitetails and Blue Corporals, Ashy Clubtails prefer to perch flat on bare-soil, fallen logs, rocks or leaf litter.”
Most of the Ashy Clubtails that I spotted were in fact perched in the middle of the trails that I was following, like the one in the final photo. Although the dragonflies are sometimes skittish, it is relatively easy to get a photo of one, albeit with a fairly uninteresting background. The Ashy Clubtail in the first photo has a somewhat more interesting pose, with a nice shadow to add some visual interest.
My favorite photo of this little group, however, has to be the middle one. I really like the confrontational pose of the female Ashy Clubtail as she perched on a leaf and looked right at me. In case you are curious, the dragonflies in the first and second photos are females and the one in the final photo is the male. If you look carefully at the tips of their abdomens (their “tails”), you can see that only the males have terminal appendages that look like a sidewards-facing parenthesis and are quite distinctive.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
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