Dragon Hunting!

Andy and I recently went to a training for the NH Dragonfly Survey, which is a program run by NH Audubon that is trying to catalogue all the dragonfly species in the state. We went because Andy in particular has been really interested in dragonflies for a long time, and despite having several decent field guides, we always find them so difficult to identify and can barely ever get a solid ID on one. So we thought we'd learn a little something. And we did. We also got ourselves a citizen science project that we'll be working on over the next few summers hopefully. We're going to try to catalogue all the dragonfly species that exist a a very cool bog just a few miles down the road from us in New London. Last sunday was our first real foray into this new "fieldwork."

I'm glad there weren't any REAL entomologists anywhere around, because I'm sure we looked absolutely ridiculous leaping and lunging at the whizzing dragons while trying to stay on the narrow bog bridging. It's quite an art to catch a dragonfly. Good luck to you if you try to nab one head-on, their compound eyes can see that coming in the spectra-vision of a thousand lenses. The best way is to watch the flight pattern of a particular dragon for a bit, and then scoop him up from behind just after he's passed. Ha ha, don't try this at home. Andy managed to capture quite a few dragons, but I was pretty hopeless and only came up with one capture on our first excursion. Most of what we caught were all the same species, but we did identify 2 different species with some measure of confidence. One thing we did learn at the training- you have to actually CATCH them to ID them 99% of the time (so THAT's what we'd been doing wrong all these years...).