Eight-spotted Skimmers

This morning, I headed north toward Cascade where a friend has some land along the Missouri River - with a very nice oxbow slough that looked promising for dragonflies. There are no dragonfly records for Cascade County so I scheduled this jaunt to see what species I could record for the county. As I had hoped, the slough supported a good number and variety of dragonflies - plus some damsels similar to what I had been finding in the Helena area. The most colorful of the Odes encountered today - or at least those I could capture or get close to - were the eight-spotted skimmers. And they were also quite abundant. While exploring the slough, I encountered a side channel that I wanted to cross. The site of an old beaver dam provided that opportunity - with water only up to mid calf on my hip boots. On my return to the side channel, I decided to cross several yards down channel from my initial crossing. In the first small step, the water was over my hip boots. And after the second, the water reached lower chest level. After letting out a WHOOP - and several other verbalizations I can't repeat here - I managed to make it back up onto the shore. My hip boots each now had about 2 gallons of water in them, and the status of my camera and binoculars was of great concern. I emptied the hip boots and then decided to shed most of my clothes to wring them out and set them in the sun for a while. An inspection of my camera and binos revealed that they took a quick dip with me but seemed to have suffered no ill effects. Of course, this was good news! Assessing my present situation - partially naked body and all - and hoping that no one was around to see my unclothed state of body, I nearly fell over with laughter! In the many decades I have spent wading rivers and lakes, this event left me wetter than I can ever recall. And it is a good thing that with age, I am now able to laugh at myself for the brazen self confidence of not testing the water's depth before taking the first step!

Was this skimmer image worth it? I think so! There is another very similar species - Twelve-spotted Skimmer - in Montana, but so far this year, I have only found one of them and that was in Helena. The naming of these species gives a pretty clear indication of what they are when you see them. Each wing on the Eight-spotted has two dark spots - for a total of eight. On the Twelve-spotted, each wing has 3 dark spots, but I don't have a photo of the latter for this year yet.

A new species of damselfly has just emerged in the past several days - Common or Northern Spreadwing. Note that the wings do not fold neatly over the back as in many other damsels - thus the name spreadwing. If you look closely below the thorax on this image, you will note what looks like small eggs. Actually, these are parasites that are sometimes found on Odes(Dragonflies and Damsels), but they apparently are not especially detrimental to the bugs unless the infestation is especially heavy. Remember to click on the image to enlarge it. When searching for Odes, you never quite know what you might run in to. My lifetime of fly fishing has brought me considerable familiarity with mayflies - insect Order Ephemeroptera. Now that birding/dragonfly watching/photography have mostly replaced my days of trout fishing on Montana's rivers and lakes, I don't pay quite as much attention to mayflies. But in the past week or so, I have had the opportunity to photograph several of these dainty and beautiful insects. Here is one I encountered today. I'm not quite sure what the species is, but it sure caught my eye!!