dragonflies in flight

Posts Tagged ‘dragonflies in flight’

Territoriality

Posted in Dragonflies, dragonfly, Insects, Nature, Photography, Summer, wildlife, tagged Canon 50D, dragonflies in flight, Eastern Amberwing, Eastern Amberwing dragonfly, Fort Belvoir VA, Jackson Miles Abbott Wetland Refuge, Perithemis tenera, Tamron 180mm on August 19, 2020| 14 Comments »

Male dragonflies are often territorial and spend a lot of their time chasing off intruders, like these rival male Eastern Amberwing dragonflies (Perithemis tenera) that I spotted earlier this month at Jackson Miles Abbott Wetland Refuge. Although Eastern Amberwing dragonflies are quite small (one inch (25 mm) or less in length), they tend to hover a bit when they are flying, which makes them a little easier to photograph in flight than most other dragonfly species.

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Saddlebags in the air

Posted in Dragonflies, Insects, Macro Photography, Nature, Photography, Summer, tagged Alexandria VA, Black Saddlebags, Canon 100mm macro lens, Canon 50D, dragonflies in flight, Huntley Meadows Park, Tramea lacerata on July 29, 2014| 3 Comments »

Normally when I think of saddlebags, I think of cowboys and the Pony Express, but there is also a species of skimmer dragonflies known as Black Saddlebags (Tramea lacerata). Someone obviously thought the dark patches on the hind wings looked like saddlebags.

Unlike many of the dragonflies that I often observe, Black Saddlebag dragonflies like to fly high in the air (and not low over the water) and some of them even migrate. I was alerted to their presence at my local marsh by a recent posting by a local dragonfly expert and fellow photographer Walter Sanford, so yesterday I kept one eye to the sky yesterday as I searched for subjects to photograph.

Black Saddlebags flew over me several times and I was fortunate to get some shots of one of them in flight. It might have been nice to have used a longer lens than the 100mm macro lens that I had on my camera at the time, but the shots turned out pretty well nonetheless. The first image is the sharpest image, but I like the entire sequence of the three images and the way in which they convey a sense of the environment in which I was shooting.

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