A diminutive eastern

amberwing dragonfly teeters on his perch atop a stick protruding from the surface of the lake. Less than an inch long, the eastern amberwing is a tiny brown dragonfly with clear amber wings and a ringed, spindle-shaped abdomen. Facing toward the center of the lake, he surveys his surroundings with bulbous eyes for potential challengers. Triggered by some unseen threat, he sallies forth to execute a complicated set of petal-shaped maneuvers that create an aerial daisy with his perch as the center point. He returns to his stick throne.

A widow skimmer patrols the shoreline on conspicuously marked wings. A large dark patch extends outward from wing base to midwing, where it meets a broad white band. He skims low

over the water with a jerky, fluttering flight; dominating the shoreline by aggressively chasing intruders of his own species, but ignoring, and being ignored by, the amberwing

Looking as though he is defying a tailwind, a blue dasher perches on the slender tip of a sedge at the water’s edge, abdomen horizontal, wings folded forward to shade his thorax. His abdomen is blueberry-blue with a black tip, his thorax pale green with zebra stripes, and his magnificent bulging eyes a bright metallic green. Rising to meet an incoming male, he lifts his abdomen in a threat display, flying beneath his opponent to force him up away from the water.

Dating back to the misty ages of the Pennsylvanian period 300 million years ago, when ferns towered like trees and dinosaurs did not yet exist, giant twelve-inch dragonflies patrolled the primordial swamps on thirty inch wingspans. Though much smaller, today’s dragonflies still look like those giant dragons of the past, retaining some primitive characteristics abandoned by more modern insects. Unlike those of the today’s insects, the front and back wings of dragonflies flap separately and cannot be folded. Dragonflies rest with wings out to their sides, like biplanes.

Glimmering, shimmering, glittering, shining, iridescent - these graceful children of the sun are especially loved for the beauty of their long membranous wings and colorful bodies. Their brilliant colors, bold, acrobatic flight, complex behaviors, and ubiquity around bodies of water in mid-summer are making them increasingly popular subjects for study.

A dragonfly can hover, fly sideways, stop on a dime, change direction, and even spurt backwards at astonishing speeds. Rather than slipping air smoothly over sleek airfoils as birds do, dragonflies create furious vortices which swirl much faster than the surrounding airflow around the surface of the wings. The speed of the air immediately adjacent to the wing produces lift in both planes. The wings vibrate as fast as sixteen hundred times per minute, allowing the dragonfly to reach speeds of over thirty miles per hour.

The bulging compound eyes of a dragonfly may contain as many as thirty thousand lenses, giving the dragonfly the sharpest vision of all insects. Highly visual creatures, dragonflies see color, ultra-violet, and polarized light, can see in all directions, can see well in low light and can detect rapid movement. The head is attached to the slender body by a ball and socket joint that enables it to turn almost completely around and see both above and below.

Dragonflies are sometimes known as “devil’s darning needles” for their ability to stitch together the lips of the wicked or as “snake doctors” for their ability to raise snakes from the dead. Although neither fanciful name is deserved, dragonflies certainly earn their other nickname “mosquito hawk.” In its lifetime, a typical dragonfly consumes thousands of mosquitoes - eating mosquito larvae as naiads and adult mosquitoes when they take to the air.

Ferocious, voracious, carnivorous, insatiable - darting above the prairie, dragonflies are searching for food. The “Odonates,” the toothed ones, are voracious predators with serrated jaws. Plucking winged pests from the air, devouring them in flight with an almost insatiable appetite, the dragonfly captures and eats hordes of flying insects by skimming through the air, scooping up its victims in a basket formed by spine-fringed legs.

Dragonflies at the water’s edge are ready to mate. Males arrive from foraging areas first, competing for the best breeding sites. These limited breeding sites are the center of dragonfly life. As the females arrive, males scramble to defend territory and intercept females. Jealously guarded by the attending male, females lay their eggs. In five to ten days, the eggs hatch..

Dragonflies spend most of their lifetimes underwater, molting as many as fifteen times before undergoing metamorphosis. To transform from ponderous glutton to winged lord of the skies, dragonfly nymphs climb from the water, usually in early morning. Clinging fast to a stick or weed along the shoreline, the skin splits down the back, and an adult emerges with damp and crumpled wings. When the wings unfold and the glistening new coat has hardened, the insect darts into the sunshine, leaving behind the empty skin, the ghost of its former self.