Blue For You

This week's PhotoHunt theme is 'blue' and it wasn't too hard to find a photo with blue in it. The trouble was I have too many with blue. So which should I use?

Well, for pure color in nature I think it is hard to beat dragonflies and damselflies. I've always been amazed by the sharp and brilliant blues, reds, and greens one can see in these little flying marvels. Not surprisingly, many dragons and damsels have common names which include their color. Who can resist those vivid names such as Blue-fronted Dancer, Yellow-legged Ringtail, and Orange Shadowdragon.

Even their group names are fun with names like Darner, Skimmer, PetalTails, and Cruisers. And damselflies even have a whole group known as Bluets.

So damselflies it is.

I have found that it is very difficult to identify some of the damsels and dragons, however. There are well over 400 species in the USA alone. (There are over 160 found in our state and probably over 100 in our particular area.) And for each species the male and female may be significantly different in color or some other aspect.

Plus, the juveniles may be even a different color and will change gradually as they mature over their relatively short life stage. When you add all that up and consider that not all the damsels and dragons will necessarily look like the 'specimen' photo's in a field guide you can see that making the correct identification would often be difficult for the layperson.

In any event, it would appear that we will be having plenty of opportunities to check out the damselflies in coming years based on the activity in the following photo's. These are damselflies laying eggs in the shallow water along the edge of the pond. As you can tell we have a healthy population with the promise of more to come.


You can find more participants in the hunt at PhotoHunt.