Since I am a glutton for pain, figured I might as well make it two dragons in a row. If you recall from the last post (link here), the pain part comes during the identification process. In truth, they are such fun to photograph that the effort to identify them is a small price to pay. If you can get them to stand still long enough you can usually pull of pretty impressive shots.
These dragonflies were also taken at the Jubilee State Park pond on one of those days when the birds decided to stay indoors in the cool air conditioning. Never want to waste a day out in the field so anything with wings will due. Case in point the two dragons featured here. This particular shot .. which you will notice produced the two following shots .. came out nice from a texture perspective. You kind of lose it from the base shot, but when you zoom in a bit it really produces a nice overall effect – not to mention the color palette with the dragon coordinated quite well.
So this is where it became interesting. The obvious characteristic is the wing spots. The body is a common brown and the eyes are not as unique as the previous Dragonhunter. However, the fact that both of these have exactly 12 spots on their transparent wings was enough to go hunting on the web. That hunt produced results immediately. Turns out there is a Dragonfly named Twelve-Spotted Skimmer. Taking you way back, a Widow Skimmer had made its presence known on the blog before (link here). The first reference link was the Montana Field Guide (link here). Their reference image was a little troubling in that it had white spots on the wings along with the darker spots. As you can see, my specimen had nothing of the sort – just black spots. That just means another validation with or friends over at Wikipedia (link here). That produced a similar image labeled the male, however, they had another reference shot of the female and NO WHITE SPOTS!
Hit the jump to see some pics of the male .. and just maybe a correction.
Life Intrigued 