Dragons!

On Aug 18, 4:32*pm, D. LaCourse wrote:
On 2010-08-18 10:25:23 -0400, Conan The Librarian said:

* *Nice, Wolfgang, thanks. *Funny but I have always been a fan of
dragonflies. *I remember one evening watching dozens of them cavort
outside my window while I was listening to John Coltrane. *Damn things
seemed to be flying in time with the song I was listening to ("Afro-
Blue" from _Live at Birdland_). *I love watching them come out when
I've just finished mowing the lawn. *I guess I stir up small bugs as I
mow, and they just come in and clean up.

"Live at Birdland" - grea album.

That album was my introduction to jazz. My dad had a copy of it
(for some unknown reason, as he was more into bossa nova and other
latin-flavored music), and I'll never forget the first time I listened
to "Afro-Blue". I was 13 years old and listened to nothing but the
rock music of the times (this would have been 1969). I can't really
put it into words, so I'll just steal a favorite phrase around he I
was ... changed.

We I was a kid we called dragon flies draning needles and the "word"
was that they could sew your lips together. *(I'll wait for the
comeback on that one! *d;o) *) *They are a good fly on the Rapid and I
have taken some nice brookies with a blue one with spinner type wings.

Very cool. I have tied up dragon and damsel adults, but never had
anything strike at them before.

Dave (on the porch in Camp Denmar at Lakewood enjoying the 73 degree weather)


Chuck Vance (sitting inside where it's been over 100 for the
last 4 days)

On 2010-08-19 11:13:35 -0400, Conan The Librarian said:


That album was my introduction to jazz. My dad had a copy of it
(for some unknown reason, as he was more into bossa nova and other
latin-flavored music), and I'll never forget the first time I listened
to "Afro-Blue". I was 13 years old and listened to nothing but the
rock music of the times (this would have been 1969). I can't really
put it into words, so I'll just steal a favorite phrase around he I
was ... changed.


Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond had the same effect on me in 1954. When
everyone else was "rockin' around the clock", I was groovin' with Miles
Davis, Brubeck, Jamal, Zoot Sims, et al. I played the clarinet
(including the bass clarinet), and I tried to mimic Mulligan by putting
the bell of the bass in a trash can. My mom didn't like the sounds
that came from that can. d;o) I bought a beat up alto sax and taught
myself to play - not much difference from the clarinet. Wish I had
continued with it.

Warm in camp. Fished this morning in the fog and tool some nice salmon
and a small brookie. Hope lunch is good - I am famished!

Dave

On Aug 19, 11:21*am, D. LaCourse wrote:
On 2010-08-19 11:13:35 -0400, Conan The Librarian said:



* *That album was my introduction to jazz. *My dad had a copy of it
(for some unknown reason, as he was more into bossa nova and other
latin-flavored music), and I'll never forget the first time I listened
to "Afro-Blue". *I was 13 years old and listened to nothing but the
rock music of the times (this would have been 1969). *I can't really
put it into words, so I'll just steal a favorite phrase around he I
was ... changed.

Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond had the same effect on me in 1954. *When
everyone else was "rockin' around the clock", I was groovin' with Miles
Davis, Brubeck, Jamal, Zoot Sims, et al. *I played the clarinet
(including the bass clarinet), and I tried to mimic Mulligan by putting
the bell of the bass in a trash can. *My mom didn't like the sounds
that came from that can. *d;o) *I bought a beat up alto sax and taught
myself to play - not much difference from the clarinet. *Wish I had
continued with it.

Small world. I too played the clarinet as a youngster. I was good
enough that I was studying privately with a teacher from the local
music college while I was in high school. Eventually gave it up
because I felt like I wouldn't have time for it while in college. (It
would have cut into my party time too much.)

About 15 years ago I decided to take up tenor sax. (I blame that
on Coltrane as well.) Bought a used one and taught myself to play. I
got pretty good at it and then family responsibilities got in the way,
and I set it aside. It's up in a closet somewhere. Maybe I'll take
it with me to Mexico when we retire and and take it up again.

I'll certainly have time for it. :-)

Warm in camp. *Fished this morning in the fog and tool some nice salmon
and a small brookie. *Hope lunch is good - I am famished!

Sounds nice. Wish I was somewhere that's only "warm".


Chuck Vance (it's at 88 degrees and rising)

"Giles" wrote in message
...
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

For the last several nights, we have had a "hatch" so to speak of dragon
flies flying about over our deck. I know very little about dragon flies,
however I'm guessing they are eating the smaller flying insects? Anyway,
these dragons are about 3 to 3.5 inches long with a similar length wing
span. At any given time in the evening hours after the sun has gone down
before dark, there can be 25 to 100 dragons (rough estimate) flying about.

They looks something like this, although I think the body is a bit thicker
on the variation at our place in Northwest:
http://tinyurl.com/32k9y2y

Interesting stuff for sure.

Thanks for sharing,
JT

On Aug 19, 10:03 am, Conan The Librarian wrote:
On Aug 18, 10:02 pm, Giles wrote:



Music and nature always seem to have a profound overlap for me.

I remember once seeing Steve Allen (on television of course, and
many, many years ago) compsing melodies by superimposing a musical
staff on photographs of various metropolitan skylines and placing a
note at the top of each building. Not exactly "nature" but trees or
mountain tops could work as well, I think. Even then it's probably
not the sort of overlap you're suggesting, right?

But then, we are Homo sapiens....the animal that synthesizes.
Interestingly, even primitive cultures produce (or used to, anyway)
music of a bewildering variety, some of which is obviously related to
the natural world around them in one way or another, and some of which
is (or at least seems so to me) profoundly apart from it.

Maybe because they are both so important in my life.

As is true of so many things, I have a hard time defining my
relationship to music. I wake up every morning "with a song in my
heart"......literally (well, almost). There is always a tune dancing
around in my head and I spend most of each day humming one song or
another (Peter, Paul and Mary's "Pretty Mary" as I sit typing this).
And I've made several abortive attempts to learn to play a variety of
musical instruments. But despite all this I've never considered music
to be important in my life. In fact, the question had never arisen
till you mentioned it.

I love watching them come out when
I've just finished mowing the lawn. I guess I stir up small bugs as I
mow, and they just come in and clean up.

There's just WAY too much **** to know in this world. There is no way
to catch up. Becky and I have been so absorbed in observing the
dragons that we have never paid much attention to exactly what they
are chasing and eating. On the face of it your observation makes
perfect sense

From some of your sightings, they may also be after a water
source.

Yours might be, but that isn't consistent with the observation that
they come out in numbers after you mow. Ours never have to search for
a source of water. For something as mobile and fast as a dragonfly a
source of open water is never more than a few minutes away in this
part of the world.

In fact, this last Sunday was the first time I've seen them this
year. So even as far as it is (in all possible senses) from Texas to
Cheeselandia, the dragons are out here too.

It would be interesting to know which species you're seeing there.
The vast majority of the migrants we've seen here in the past few days
(at least 95%) are the common green darners. Almost all of the rest
are black saddlebags (Tramea lacerata) with only one or a very few of
other species mixed in....some of which may be migratory, others
certainly are not.

After doing a bit of research, it looks like I'm seeing Tramea
lacerata. They are definitely not darners.

Both are among the easisest to identify, both in flight and at rest.
I'm sure you're right.

Chuck Vance (who calls groups of dragonflies "squadrons" for
self-evident reasons)

Good analogy. I like it.

Becky said the numbers she saw at Wind Point and at the Kenosha Dunes
were mind-boggling.....blots out the sun kind of mind boggling. I,
unfortunately, did not see those kinds of numbers. Yesterday I went
back to Grant Park to rectify that. I saw exactly one dragonfly, a
lone black saddlebags. We don't know how long the migration lasts or
where the bugs go, but we'd recently heard that the duration of the
passage across any point on the Lake Michigan shoreline can last "up
to one week," which suggests that it can also be over a lot quicker.
We bruited two theories about. One was that the bugs had all passed
and that was it for this year. The other was that the overcast skies,
marginally lower temperatures and southerly breezes had put a
temporary halt to the migration. Another trip to Grant Park today
confirmed that the latter theory was correct. They were back in even
greater numbers, and this time they had spread further inland,
covering the golf course and picnic areas in the park in numbers that
beggar the imagination. Naturally, I called Becky. By the time she
arrived, 45 minutes later, there were NO bugs down at the beach. She
was greatly disappointed. But then she found them up on the golf
course, etc. She was relieved, but unimpressed after the numbers she
had seen down in Racine and Kenosha.

Damn! Wish I'd'a been there.

Ah, but now you've got your curiosity peaked, and I imagine you
will be blessed with many future sightings.

Certainly but, alas, the migration.....or at least our experience of
it.....is now over for another season. Nevertheless, there are many
more individuals of many more species still available for observation.

Chuck vance (who knows a lot of the battle is just knowing and/
or caring enough to look)

Between us, we already have yet another thousand or so photograph to
sort through, identify, organize, etc.

giles
who knows that the great beauty of foul weather lies in opportunities
catch up on all that desk work engendered and postponed by the pretty
days.

"Giles" wrote in message
...
On Aug 18, 4:32 pm, D. LaCourse wrote:


There are probably some regional variations, but in my experience,
"darning needles" seems typically to refer not to dragonflies so much
as to damselflies.....a distinction that is probably lost on most
people since they don't seem to be aware of the difference. The
"blue" ones (which I distinctly remember as "darning needles" from my
childhood) are mostly members of the genus Ischnura, many of whose
common names are one or another kind of "bluet." Damsels, even as
compared to dragons, have an exceptionally long and slender abdomen,
thus giving rise to comaprison with darning needles (which,
incidentally, are pretty much a thing of the past in Murrica.....and
presumably in the rest of the "developed" world.....most of whose
residents under thirty or so probably have never seen it done and
don't know what the term darning refers to).
darning

Never heard of Damsellies bing called darning needles here in the UK.
However to distinguish Dragons from Damsels, Dragonflies hold their wings
out sideways when they are resting. Damsels wings lie along the length of
their bodies when at rest - something dragon's can't do.

Bill

On 8/30/2010 3:40 PM, Bill Grey wrote:
darning

Never heard of Damsellies bing called darning needles here in the UK.
However to distinguish Dragons from Damsels, Dragonflies hold their wings
out sideways when they are resting. Damsels wings lie along the length of
their bodies when at rest - something dragon's can't do.

Bill



damsellies...i like that.

fawn lake in yellowstone is chock-a-block with the damsels. had a few
land on my bare feet and toes as i sat for 30 minutes or so and watched
them grabbing small bugs (brutal damsels) and mating and depositing eggs
or something on the vegetation just under the surface by the shore...and
the brook trout eating them aalong with something else on top. i had
nothing in my sparse fly box that looked like them. i now carry a few
with me anytime i'm going near a trout lake. unfortunately, i haven't
fished any mountain lakes since fawn...though i've looked at a few
(cliff and wade lakes this year).

here in eastern nc, the largemouth bass will leap from their holdings to
grab a dragonfly hovering above a lilly pad. a special treat to
see...much like the trout i've seen coming out of the water for sulphurs
and march browns on penns, or for the mayfly of some description on
upper wilson creek (nabbed by a 10" rainbow). it's a privilege too few
in this world experience, and i reckon i'm among the fortunate to have
discovered a joy in such things...though far too late in my life. my
friend jim was a good, if harsh, teacher of such things. i've tried to
be a good student.

jeff (listening to a patty griffin cd...another pleasure found)

"jeff" wrote in message
...
On 8/30/2010 3:40 PM, Bill Grey wrote:
darning

Never heard of Damsellies bing called darning needles here in the UK.
However to distinguish Dragons from Damsels, Dragonflies hold their wings
out sideways when they are resting. Damsels wings lie along the length of
their bodies when at rest - something dragon's can't do.

Bill



damsellies...i like that.

Sorry for the typo, I'm not sure if I meant damsels or damsel flies. Put it
own to old age:-)

Bill

fawn lake in yellowstone is chock-a-block with the damsels. had a few land
on my bare feet and toes as i sat for 30 minutes or so and watched them
grabbing small bugs (brutal damsels) and mating and depositing eggs or
something on the vegetation just under the surface by the shore...and the
brook trout eating them aalong with something else on top. i had nothing
in my sparse fly box that looked like them. i now carry a few with me
anytime i'm going near a trout lake. unfortunately, i haven't fished any
mountain lakes since fawn...though i've looked at a few (cliff and wade
lakes this year).

here in eastern nc, the largemouth bass will leap from their holdings to
grab a dragonfly hovering above a lilly pad. a special treat to see...much
like the trout i've seen coming out of the water for sulphurs and march
browns on penns, or for the mayfly of some description on upper wilson
creek (nabbed by a 10" rainbow). it's a privilege too few in this world
experience, and i reckon i'm among the fortunate to have discovered a joy
in such things...though far too late in my life. my friend jim was a good,
if harsh, teacher of such things. i've tried to be a good student.

jeff (listening to a patty griffin cd...another pleasure found)

On 2010-08-30 16:02:02 -0400, jeff said:

On 8/30/2010 3:40 PM, Bill Grey wrote:
darning

Never heard of Damsellies bing called darning needles here in the UK.
However to distinguish Dragons from Damsels, Dragonflies hold their wings
out sideways when they are resting. Damsels wings lie along the length of
their bodies when at rest - something dragon's can't do.

Bill



damsellies...i like that.

fawn lake in yellowstone is chock-a-block with the damsels.

You're full of it, Miller. Fortenberry *swears* there is NO Fawn Lake
in Yellowstone. grin

Dave

On 8/30/2010 5:56 PM, Bill Grey wrote:
wrote in message
...
On 8/30/2010 3:40 PM, Bill Grey wrote:
darning

Never heard of Damsellies bing called darning needles here in the UK.
However to distinguish Dragons from Damsels, Dragonflies hold their wings
out sideways when they are resting. Damsels wings lie along the length of
their bodies when at rest - something dragon's can't do.

Bill



damsellies...i like that.

Sorry for the typo, I'm not sure if I meant damsels or damsel flies. Put it
own to old age:-)

Bill


aw hell bill...you had me. i had no idea it was a typo. i figured it was
something uniquely english or welsh. i loved it! anyway, i truly liked
it, and i'm taking it for my own...whenever i see those lovely blue
bugs, "damsellies" it will be from now on. ...and i'll put it down to
welch poetry!

jeff