Here I continue with the cue of dragonfly pictures from last summer.

First up is one of the smallest of our dragonflies. This is a male Eastern amberwing (Perithemis tenera). Males can be harder to photograph than females, but lately I have been having considerable more luck with them.

The next picture is of male common baskettail (Epitheca cynosura) (at least I think that is the species). Baskettails can be very shy, once mature, and this one would not let me get very close.

Next are some more pennant dragonflies, which are especially beautiful Odonates. The first two are of a female banded pennant (Celithemis fasciata), which used to be a fairly new species for me. This one had recently emerged as an adult so it was not able to fly far. A bit like photographing fish in a barrel, but the shiny new wings of ‘teneral’ dragonflies are always rewarding to photograph.

The next pennant is a female calico pennant (Celithemis elisa). I well remember my first encounter with this boldly patterned species only last year.

One can quickly notice that different species of dragonflies have different flying habits, and so part of identifying them from afar is to see how they fly. The young male twelve-spotted skimmer (Libellula pulchella) in the next picture is a common species, and these are rather slow fliers that stay fairly close to the ground. They readily land, and so make an easy subject to photograph.

Which leads to the last dragonfly which I first encountered in the Magic Field. Patterned very much like the twelve-spotted skimmer (which are common in this field), I at first thought that it was another twelve-spot. But it was flying fast and high as it flew to the edge of the forest and landed in the understory. Not acting like a twelve-spot! I crept in for a look, and saw a strange dragonfly with a curled abdomen. I managed to take some hasty pictures before it flew off in a flash. What was that?
Later, I learned that this was the prince baskettail (Epitheca princeps)– a new species! They are described as being especially elusive, and so I felt fortunate to have gotten it. They sometimes have a curled abdomen.
It was some weeks later in a different park that I saw a large flock of dragonflies with spotted wings that were flying very high up, well above the trees. Prince baskettails! They were feeding, zig-zagging rapidly back and forth, but also sparring with each other. Some were occasionally displaced in these aerial battles and would fly down to my height to get away from their pursuer. So I put down the camera and picked up the butterfly net and waited. In a short time (probably luck) I managed to catch one. I forgot to examine it closely but I think this one was a male. Anyway, so now what? I have a field guide for dragonflies, and in it the captions for about half of the pictures say they are of posed specimens. So I set up a staged shot, and after chilling it down on ice for about a minute I posed it to take the final pictures. The prince baskettail later recovered and flew away.

Many more to come!