Can you spot the dragonfly in the first photo? Let me give you a clue—the large dragonfly is in the center of the image. Can you see it now?
Some dragonflies are easy to see, because of their bright colors or the way that they perch in the open on prominent stalks of vegetation. Others are a bit harder to see, because they perch on the ground or in dense vegetation (or they fly continuously and rarely seem to land).
The Gray Petaltail dragonfly (Tachopteryx thoreyi) is a bit of an anomaly—it perches in the open, but is still very hard to spot. Why? Its gray and black coloration is an almost perfect match for the rough bark of the trees on which it usually perches vertically. In the past I have watched a Gray Petaltail fly to a tree and perch and had trouble seeing it, even though I knew exactly where it was.
Last Wednesday I spotted my first Gray Petaltail of the season as I was exploring a small pond in Prince William County, Virginia. I had seen this dragonfly species at this location several times to the past, so I was carefully scanning the trunks of trees on which they sunlight was shining directly—Gray Petaltails seem to prefer direct sunlight, especially earlier in the day.
I often have to rely on movement to see dragonflies that are so well camouflage, but amazingly I spotted the dragonfly in the first photo while it was still perched. I cropped the image and made a few tweaks to make it a little more visible for you, but it was so tough to spot that I had to creep closer and look from a different angle to make sure that my eyes were not playing tricks on me.
For the second and third shots, I moved around the tree in an effort to better isolate the dragonfly from the tree. I think that approach worked especially well in the final photo in which the dragonfly had raised its wings a bit. Suddenly the Gray Petaltail was much more visible. I chose my angle carefully to try to get a bit of the sky in the photo—I was shooting at an upward angle—and I really like the way that the background came out in the final image.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.