Something Green For Lunch

April 21st, 2012. There’s one grassy bend in the road into the Scull Shoals Experimental Forest where we’ve seen a lot of Spangled Skimmers (Libellula cyanea). On this afternoon, the area was full of females – easily more than a dozen.

One, particularly, attracted my attention. She repeatedly returned to this one grass stem. She would take off, fly around and return to this same stem. I watched her make several circuits and was vaguely aware that she had caught something.

Her meal was heavy and she couldn’t make it back to her ‘usual’ grass stem. She landed on another stem a little distance away.

But the meal was heavy and the combined weight was too much for the grass stem. It bent, and she ended up hanging upside-down from the stem.

She was concentrating on eating her meal that she let me get quite close.

A close-up view. Close enough to see that lunch was something green, with wings.
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Identification resources:
- Dragonflies and Damselflies (Odonata) of Georgia: Spangled Skimmer (Libellula cyanea)
- BugGuide: Spangled Skimmer (Libellula cyanea) [Male] [Female]

Related post:
- Dragonfly: Spangled Skimmer (Libellula cyanea)