THE SUMMER OF ODANATA

A 7-year-old girl sits on the dock with her feet in the lake, and a slow-moving damselfly lights on her bare knee. Its eyes are round; the facets of its wings flash tiny rainbows. A somber voice from behind  says, “That’s a darning needle. If you aren’t careful, it will sew your lips shut!” The little girl clamps her hand over her mouth and doesn’t stop running until the lake is out of sight. Thus ended a very brief interest in damselflies and dragonflies.

Six decades later, the old little girl is sitting in her kayak in the eye of a dragonfly vortex. Thousands of dragons and damsels swirling around the pond and meadows. It was an Odanata Phantasmagoria Show! I reveled in my good luck.

Who will blink first?

Eastern Pondhawk

Green, red, orange, red, black, blue. Tiny and ponderous. Plain, striped, spotted. The air is full of them zooming, dipping down for a sip of water, mating on the fly. Grass blades bend under their weight. They light on the nose of my kayak, on my hands, and horrors––on my knee!

I always thought dragonflies were the big, manly males and damselflies were the diminutive females of the same insect. They actually belong to different suborders of the order Odanata. Generally speaking, if it rests with its wings out to the side horizontally and is on the burly side, it’s a dragon. If it folds its wings back along its body and is more delicate, it’s a damsel.

Twelve-spotted Skimmer

Green Darner

It’s amazing to sit among the Odanata and know that they were darting around before there were dinosaurs. They have been flitting around the earth for 290 million years, although flitting might be a stretch; some had a wingspan of almost 30 inches, ten times the size of those on our pond.

Amberwing

We have plenty of Odanata every year, but one particular year there were swarms over the pond, the meadows, even our vegetable garden. There were 6 or 8 damsels to a blade of grass. They literally were bouncing off of us as we walked.

Bluet

People ask me if it gets lonely living in the country. The answer is––never. Not with a couple of thousand of my closest friends dropping by.

Tomorrow: The Amazing Life-cycle of the Odanata