Return to Gipsy Lake

When I visited this lovely mountain foothill lake last week to document dragonflies present in the area, I had intended to also visit some glacial potholes located nearby to the east. But my effort to locate the potholes was thwarted by heavy timber and steep slopes along the trail from which I had searched. Several days ago, I returned to the same area - this time with dragonfly expert Nate Kohler - to do more dragonfly sampling. We spent several hours in the morning on the main lake seeing what we could capture for ID purposes. It was quite breezy and the dragonflies seemed to be able to use the breeze to their advantage to avoid most of our capture attempts. Nate was more successful than I - as usual.

After eating some lunch, and armed with Google Earth photos I printed out the previous evening, we tried a new approach to reach the pothole area. From this new direction, it didn't take long to locate the first glacial pothole - and the effort was well worthwhile! From a dragonfly point of view, this type of habitat is just what we were looking for. There was a series of 6 of these potholes, all just a little different in terms of vegetation, depth and open water area - a few with very little of the latter. One of the other really neat aspects of this relatively small glaciated pothole area is that there were no trails into it and the steep hillsides and heavy timber likely keeps visitation very limited, possibly to just a few hunters in the fall. That is in spite of the the campground that is fairly close to them. Glaciers emanating from the nearby cirque in the Big Belt mountains deposited the glacial till that provides the basins for these potholes perhaps 8,000 or so years ago. It didn't take Nate long to get his collecting gear laid out and his net ready to see what he could catch. And as we had hoped, these potholes produced a number of dragonfly and damselfly species that we had not found on Gipsy Lake. The breeze that had hampered our capture efforts in the morning had now subsided so our efforts were much more successful. Captures from this day and my previous excursions resulted in the addition of about 15 new Meagher County county records for these insects. Of course, I should mention that prior to these visits, there were NO dragonfly records for this county. Of particular interest were the Lake and Sedge darners we found here plus a rather small dragonfly named a Hudsonian Whiteface, that is usually found in more northerly regions. The darners are likely the eastern most point of their distribution in this portion of Montana.

Before leaving the area to head home, I retrieved 2 cold bottles of beer I had hidden away in my cooler to celebrate the very successful day we had just completed! Could life be any better?