Dragons!

Everyone knows that birds migrate. With all the publicity that
Monarch butterflies have gotten in recent years, pretty much everybody
knows about their migrations by now, too, I suppose. What most people
don't know (largely because most people know virtually nothing about
them.....and don't care), even most people who enjoy various outdoor
activities in more or less wild settings, is that dragonflies migrate
as well. Well, some of them do; roughly 250 of the roughly 5000 known
species worldwide.

Predominant among the migrants in this part of the world is the common
green darner (Anax junius). I didn't know anything about them either
until about two years ago. It happened like this.....


On a trip to Kenosha on a preternaturally clear day, I happened to
remember that I had binoculars and a spotting scope somewhere in the
bowels of my car. I decided to show Becky something cool that I had
discovered some years before. Scanning carefully to south-southeast
(about 168 degrees) I finally found what I was looking for. I locked
the scope in position and invited Becky to have a look. Needless to
say, she was surprised and enchanted to see the Sears tower apparently
sticking up out of Lake Michigan fiftyish miles away. We (mostly she)
spent the next couple of hours getting closeup views of boats and
ships out on the lake, buildings, shoreline, waves.....and birds.
WOW! those are cool.....what are they?

Uh oh. Created a monster. So I bought her a pair of binoculars and a
spotting scope. And we spent many hundreds of dollars on various
field guides and other literature pertaining to birds, and we
travelled many hundreds of miles chasing birds for the next six months
or so. And then came June and the spring migrations tapered off and
Becky let it be known that she habored a deep and abiding (if not very
well informed) affection for dragonflies. Dragonflies? O.k., what
the hell. More trips to the bookstores ensued.

We became dragon hunters.

Rewind two years. I'm on a solo day trip, just cruising around the
city looking for stuff to photograph. I stop at A****er park up on
the north shore. Looking down the bluff I am flabbergasted by the
sight of thousands.....probably TENS of thousands.....of dragonflies
swarming all over the bluffs and the beach below! No idea of who they
are. A year later Becky and I know who they are. We go to look for
them in early September.....I think it's September that I saw them.
Nope.

It was August.



Yesterday I decided to eat lunch at the beach at Grant park, down on
the south shore (cooler by da lake, eh?). And what to my wondering
eyes should appear? Thousands of Common Green Darners! Huzzah! I
called Becky and explained the situation. I could hear tires
squealing all the way from Burlington, thirty miles away.

The clouds of dragons and crowds of people on the beach were,
characteristically, pretty much oblivous to one another. Only a few
individuals from each group took notice of the others and then only
briefly. The dragons, as is their habit, flitted about in all
directions, but it was easy to see that they nevertheless tended to
flow, as a group, slowly and steadily southward along the beach. As
they diminished, flying across Oak Creek and the Yacht Club, toward
the power plant, their numbers were constantly replenished from the
north, toward downtown.

I had to head back to work before Becky arrived. We kept in touch via
phone. She reported that the number of bugs coming through remained
steady for the hour or so that she stayed there. I had earlier
suggested that she might try to follow them south along the shore.
She did so, finding vast numbers at Bender park just a few miles
south, and even greater numbers at Wind Point, a promontory that juts
well out into the lake.

Early this morning Becky checked out the Kenosha Dunes on the south
side of that city. Dragonflies are cold-blooded. She found the low
vegetation on the dunes littered with innumerable bugs.

The chase goes on.

giles