Blue Dasher

About the Blue Dasher

The mature male dusts over powder-blue with brilliant green eyes - one of the commonest and most photogenic dragonflies on any Texas pond. Females and young males wear yellow-striped black instead, so a single pondside session offers two completely different portraits of the same species.

Blue Dashers are perchers. A male claims a twig or reed tip, sallies out after prey or rivals, and returns to the exact same perch, over and over, for hours - which is precisely what makes them so photographable. Set up on the perch, pre-focus, and the subject keeps delivering itself.

On the hottest afternoons they point the abdomen straight at the sun, minimizing the surface exposed - the obelisk pose, one of the insect world's most elegant pieces of thermoregulation and a striking photograph in itself.

They eat on a conveyor: hundreds of small flying insects a day, mosquitoes prominent among them, taken in short precise flights from the perch. The aquatic nymphs work the pond from below with the same appetite. Any still water with emergent stems will hold them from spring through fall.