Mike Powell

I spotted this dragonfly during a recent visit to Occoquan Regional Park. I got a glimpse of the markings on its body as it zoomed past me, so I knew that it was a spiketail, but I was not sure about the species. I watched it patrol up and down a small stream and managed to finally get a shot of the dragonfly when it perched momentarily.

It turned out to be a Brown Spiketail (Cordulegaster bilineata), one of several spiketail species that I have seen in the past at this park. During most of my previous encounters with spiketails, they have been perching on vegetation in sunlit areas along a trail.

In this case, the area where the dragonfly was patrolling was mostly in the shade, so it was a real challenge to track and photograph the dragonfly. In case you are curious, I took the photo with my Canon 7D DSLR and my Tamron 18-400mm lens extended to 400mm with settings of ISO 800, F/8.0, and 1/320 sec. The settings were not optimal for getting a shot, but they worked well enough.

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

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Are you ever fully satisfied when you meet a goal? I think that many of us drawn to wildlife photograph are restless in our pursuit of newer and better images. We can celebrate our successes, but we tend to be self-critical. We are convinced that we can always improve our skills and our photos, that we need to keep pushing and pushing in a never ending quest for more interesting subjects or better conditions or sharper images .

In many ways, that was the case for me this past Monday, when fellow dragonfly enthusiast Walter Sanford and I scoured an area of Occoquan Regional Park for spiketail dragonflies. In a blog posting earlier this week I chronicled our long and ultimately successful search for the elusive Twin-spotted Spiketail. I was feeling a bit tired by the time we saw that dragonfly, but Walter had told me that an additional dragonfly species had been spotted in that same area, the Brown Spiketail dragonfly (Cordulegaster bilineata).

So we kept going and went looking again in an area that we had searched earlier in the day. Some say that the definition of insanity is repeating the same actions and expecting different results. If that’s true, I guess that I qualify as being more than a little crazy. It turned out that we were lucky, really lucky and had multiple chances that afternoon to photograph several male Brown Spiketails. Unlike the Twin-spotted Spiketails from earlier in the day that flew away and never returned, the Brown Spiketails would fly only a short distance away when spooked and it was relatively easy to track them visually to their new perches. Eventually we reached a point of satiation where we would not even take a shot of a dragonfly if it was even partially obscured by vegetation or was facing in the wrong direction. We hoped we would see a female of the species, but it turns out that all of the spiketails we saw that day were males.

The Brown Spiketail dragonflies seem to have a lighter-colored bodies than the Twin-spotted Spiketails (brown vs black) and has paler spots, but to my inexperienced eye they otherwise look pretty similar. I was happy to capture some relatively sharp images that you can see in even greater resolution by clicking on them. For even more detailed photos, check out Walter’s excellent images of our adventures in his blog posting today. He has mastered some techniques that allow him to capture an amazing amount of detail in his dragonfly shots.

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

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