Dade County, Miami, Fla.

Temperatures reached an unseasonal 85+ today during a trip to Miami. Calm air and easy access to Snapper Creek made choice of activities a formality.

I had visited Snapper Creek a few weeks ago and bought a new camera at the Best Buy, adjacent to the river and taken a memorable piture of a Halloween Pennant. Today with yet another new camera, the Canon 50D, I was hoping to recreate that success.

As I approached the river, I noticed a Great Egret and 2 White Ibis close to the water's edge. A pair of large iguanas were moving towards the sunlit grass.

Snapper Creek is approx 8 meters wide at this point and has 2 or 3 meters of grass on both banks. The margins have grass and a few other emergent plants. In some spots, mats of weed cling close to the banks. The water is very clear and has a good flow. There are many fish, some quite sizeable.

The first ode was seen from the Northern bank right beside the bridge at Dadelands North Metrorail station. It was a Scarlet Skimmer, Crocothemis servilia. This dragonfly has appeared in the blog before and today takes the crown for the most widespread ode that this blogger has seen. First seen in Singapore, it has subsequently been found in Hong Kong, where it goes by the name of Crimson Darter, and in India during October.

The website Odonata Central has very little to say about this species, which I found surprising for such an apparently abundant and dramatic-looking creature. This leads me to wonder if it has been introduced or escaped along with the iguanas and the parrots. Despite it's uncertain provenance, it is quite approachable and sits well for pictures. Without any evidence to the contrary, I am assuming this to be the female.

Next was the tiny, Spot-tailed Dasher. Another seemingly abundant species, which also fails to make it into the "Beginner's Guide to Dragonflies", which I am currently using as my reference field-guide.

The little dasher was then displaced by the much larger, Blue Dasher. The Blue Dasher was the original holder of the distribution title having been seen from Toronto, Canada to Califonia.

Then came the dragonfly which had been at the back of my mind when I had chosen to come to Snapper Creek. I had taken a picture of it for the previous Miami post, but it had not been sufficiently detailed to allow me to properly identify it. I can now reveal that it is a Tawny Pennant, Brachymesia herbula. I was beginning to suspect that the Stokes's had forgotten to visit Florida while researching their book as 3 out of 4 odes seen so far had been omitted. Despite that, the guide will probably please most people who don't get anal about identifying down to the sub-special levels.

I doff my hat to Warwick and Michele Tarboten for this next photo. I would not have even considered taking a shot, were it not for the photo on the back cover of their "A Fieldguide to the Damselflies of South Africa". Now, if ever you are considering writing an Odonata fieldguide, may I suggest this as a standard to which you should aspire. I believe it to be a Rambur's Forktail. This species is mentioned by the beginner's guide, but when you do not have the full set for comparison, how can a definitive identification be made?

And so to the one that got away. This was my best pictuere of the day which makes it frustrating not to get a positive ID. My suspicions lead me towards a female Eastern Amberwing. It was about the right size and the abdomen is suggestive of amberwing. The eyes and the yellow marks on the thorax fit the descriptions of the amberwing. The wings however made me doubt the accuracy of my assumptions. The creature left it's wings to flutter in the light breeze in the same way that I had seen the Halloween Pennant doing on my previous visit. The wings were also much more heavily marked than I have seen in any photos or illustrations. There were both Eastern Amberwings and Halloween Pennants in the vicinity to compare size and flutteriness with. I see that the amberwings sometimes imitate wasps, but the fluttering did not seem reminiscent of any wasp that I had seen before. So I find myself unsatisfied with Eastern Amberwing. Perhaps there is a tiny pennant that I have not found in my research yet. All thoughts are welcome.

Odonata species; 8

Rambur's Forktail 12, Eastern Meadowhawk 4, Eastern Amberwing 6, Scarlet Skimmer 8, Spot-tailed Dasher 8, Blue Dasher 2, Tawny Pennant 12, Halloween Pennant 1,

Sultanpur, New Delhi, India

The logistics of getting to and a description of Sultanpur Lake are given in the respective post on http://www.redgannet.blogspot.com/
I have brought a new camera with me today. The Canon 50D arrived just an hour before I left for the airport, giving me just enough time to get some steam into the battery.
With 15.1 million pixels, I was looking forward to some superfine detail and got my first chance to try it out as soon as I walked through the gate.

A dragonfly was perched on an aloe-type plant. I suspect it was a female or juvenile of the darker, redder ode below. They both exhibit similar blotches at the bases of the wings.This particular species was very common in this locale with hundreds of them in the meadows and the wet margins of the lake. It is very reminiscent of a Crimson Darter, Cocothemis servilia, but I have nothing else to compare it to. It is duller than previous encounters with C.s. I had ordered a book that I hoped would enable me to identify some of the common odonata of India. It arrived while I was away, but on opening it on my return, I found it to be quite useless. The illustrations were childlike and photos were poorly printed. So I find myself throwing the identifications open to anyone who can help.
The second dragonfly was seen in long dry grass away from the lake and was seen only once.In terms of quantity it was dramatically outnumbered by all the others today.
At the lakeside, I saw a familiar face. It was the Green Skimmer which has previously featured in Redgannet’s bird blog (before the schism) in posts from Singapore and Hong Kong. It is a very widespread dragonfly that is distributed from Europe to Australia and all points between, taking in Russia and North Africa on the way.The skimmer was very approachable and allowed me to get close to him with the 50mm macro lens.
Seen away from the water as well as in the margins of the lake was a Pied Percher. This is another ode that is crossing the divide from the bird blog after first appearing in the Hong Kong Post. The photos were taken in deep shadow and the white markings between the black markings and the wingtips did not show up well. A similar-looking dark dragonfly could be related. It’s general appearance seems very close to the percher’s, but we all know how similar some other forms of odonata are, so I am not taking anything for granted. Both of them seemed to be weak fliers, resting after short forays.

High excitement about the camera inevitably led to disappointment. It is still me behind the lens after all and I continue to make the same mistakes and get too greedy with zoom versus exposure. I do like the 50D however.
The 15.1 megapixels are a big step up from the 6mps of the 350D. The 6.3 frames per sec. worried me slightly and I predicted endless amounts of deleting pictures that I didn’t like. Will it make me more choosy about the pictures I take or will I continue working on the principle that if I take hundreds of shots, one of them must surely be OK? I wonder.

The memory fills up quickly. Using the superfine quality with RAW too, burns 20mbs for each shot. A 2 second burst would be quarter of a gigabyte. There is a low speed autowind at about 3 frames per sec which will save on memory and deleting.
The processing time once downloaded onto the computer is a drag too. But the choice has been made between high optical zoom and better cropping ability and the price is memory and processing time as opposed to bulky lenses and shaky shots.
The camera itself is big in the hand, but easy to use. Best of all the settings are easily accessible and obvious in format.
The battery lasted reasonably well. It took 400 pictures and allowed me to view them all a couple of times afterwards.
I made a couple of foolish errors during the day. In Servo AF, it is able to find focus and predict movement of moving objects. Focus locking and recomposing in this mode does not work and I found myself with a lot of blurry shots.
The Auto White Balance mode did not pick up the changing conditions from bright sun to shade very well, nor from outdoors to indoors. I may have to set WB manually in future.

High Park, Toronto

High Park in Toronto is described in the respective post on http://www.redgannet.blogspot.com/
Grenadier Lake forms the western boundary of the park and is fed from a stream and storm water from the city of Toronto. It’s banks are thinly covered with reeds and rushes with a small reeded marsh at the top end. Other small ponds are formed from dams on a storm water stream running through the eastern part of the park.
I saw the first flight at 08.30. A pair of ponds in the northeast sector of the park should have been very productive at the right time of day, but I passed through too early. They would be worth a look when the sun is higher on my next visit. Grenadier Lake was teeming with Blue Dashers, which are fast becoming the most widespread odonata for this observer so far. On this occasion, I saw that the wings were more shaded than I had previously noted. The specimens that I had observed in LAX, MIA and PHX had been much cleaner of wing.
This caused me to look more carefully and I saw amongst the shaded wings, some clearer ones. These belonged to the Eastern Meadowhawk.
Away from the lake are some streams and damp meadows. Here I met the female Eastern Meadowhawk. Thinking I had a new species, I was determined to get a good photo and she proved to be very obliging. She had caught and was eating a small, blue fly It was at this point that I checked my “remaining frames” counter and saw that it had hardly changed. I had set the definition very low last week and had not changed it back. All of the pictures taken this week have been at 1mb or less. Changing the resolution back to high, the pictures were over 4mb.The definition is compromised when put onto the blog, so the difference would only be obvious when the subject is heavily cropped, but it is very noticeable on the monitor with the full size picture. A Green Darner settled into the grass for a close-up. A saddlebags flew over in silhouette but I am not yet proficient enough to tell which.
At the southern end of the park, a storm water pond overflows a weir and ends up in lake Ontario. Here, were hundreds of odonata. 12-spotted Skimmers, Green darners, Eastern Meadowhawks and Blue Dashers. The zygoptera were too far away on the whole to get a good look at. This one could be a Familiar Bluet, but I am going to need more practice identifying before I claim him in red.

ps. when in Toronto, visit the Open Air Book and Map Shop. It is a basement shop down some stairs at the corner of Toronto and Adelaide. It is exactly what it claims to be and even with agoraphilia like mine, I find it a pleasure to spend hours inside. Bird books and mammal encyclopaedia, insects, travel. There are no books about cooking or teen idols, no magazines about overexposed celebrities, just outdoor books and maps.

Newark, Woodbridge

A warm, clear day turned my birdwatching morning into a dragonfly frenzy in Newark this week. A small slow stream runs through Merrill Park South and a wide, muddy bend proved very productive. For details of how to get to Merrill Park South, consult the birdy blog http://www.redgannet.blogspot.com/
First was a dragonfly with large blotches on its wings which flushed from the grass above the bank, then settled on a rock to have its picture taken. It was identified as a Common Whitetail female The rocks created a semi-dam across part of the stream and allowed me to get out into the middle of the river and look back towards the bank. Two forms of what I assumed must be pennants of some sort were dog-fighting with each other over the shallow bend in the stream. One was the male of the Common Whitetail. They would settle from time to time, but at a distance, so I had to get my feet wet and muddy again to get close enough for a picture.This one is a 12-spotted Skimmer The dog-fights continued with, at one point, as many as eight odonata of 4 different species (the pennants, Blue Dasher and a Green Darner) chasing each other up and down the stream. A video would have been more use than a stills camera.
For reasons of incompetence, the pictures may seem low resolution this week. Simpletons in the settings department are to blame. On some floating mats of weed, were a couple of different zygoptera. They were very common in the muddy bay, laying eggs among the weeds. I now know that one of the damselflies was an Eastern Forktail and I am assuming that the layers were females. Another was very distinctive with a violet abdomen and a blue tip.It proved to be a Variable Dancer.
Evergreen Meadows is a private estate in neighbouring Edison. Beside the approach road is a boggy patch that provided more rich pickings. The pennants showed again and a red meadowhawk sat well for me. There is a lot of controversy and confusion about red meadowhawks. A number of species are very similar and cannot safely be separated in the field. So unless anyone can tell from this photo, it will remain a mystery.
Next, I cycled on to Menlo Park which has a lake with formal edges and no bankside vegetation for the most part. The island end provides a small proportion of bankside that is better suited to dragonflies and they love the stakes around the island, but sadly, so do Green Herons. Eastern Amberwings and Blue Dashers were very common. Soft floating weed provided ovipositing opportunities and even a feather sufficed as a perch in the absence of anything else at the formal end of the lake. There is a confusing set of bluets that ought to be examined in the hand for definitive identification. I think that this is possibly a Familiar Bluet, but since it has such close look-alikes, this may prove a hasty assumption.
If I can put a name to all the odes that I saw today, I could end up with my biggest ever list of 14 species.

Odonata species 8

Variable Dancer, Familiar Bluet, Eastern Forktail, Fragile Forktail, Green Darner, 12-spotted Skimmer, Common Whitetail, Blue Dasher, Meadowhawk sp, Eastern Amberwing,

On a trip to Miami this week, I was tempted by a new camera and succumbed. I had been looking for a little while at the Nikon Coolpix P90, hoping that it would save me a lot of carrying and lens changing. It has a 24x optical zoom. By some jiggery pokery, the tech specs claim this equates to 26-624mm on a 35mm format SLR camera. My DSLR has a sensor which is smaller than 35mm and thereby produces a cropping effect. This is how my 400mm appears to be 640mm.
Most of my photos are taken at the high end of my 100-400mm Canon. If I need a landscape picture though, I have to change to an 18-55mm. The macro lens is a 50mm Sigma. It is a lot to carry around and a common problem is dust which enters the camera during lens changing. So, a camera with a high top-end zoom, a wide angle capability and a macro function too, might just be the solution. It even has a video capability.
Could it perform well enough to replace the SLR and all it’s lenses? To save you skipping to the bottom of the page in anticipation to find out if in fact it is the answer to all my problems, I am sad to say, it is not.
There is no arguing with the macro function. The result from a quick practice was stupendous. The photo below has been reduced in quality for the blog, but believe me, it is breathtaking on my 17”monitor in the study. I bought the camera from a shop beside a small river near Dadeland Mall. In a stretch of less than 50m of riverbank, I saw 9 different types of dragonflies. Most of them have yet to be identified, but there is enough detail here to confirm that it is a Halloween Pennant.
One issue with the macro function is that the optical zoom is restricted so it is not much bigger than the 50mm Sigma. The "live view" function though allows the picture to be composed at arms length which is a big advantage over my current SLR without "live view". The screen folds out to give good sight even at odd angles. The screen is nice and bright too which allows one to view pictures even in the bright Florida sun.
The wide angle and mid range zoom are fine. I have no problems there.
The top-end zoom works well when the subject is clearly differentiated from the background. Otherwise the auto focus struggles. A dragonfly perched on a stalk with water vegetation behind it took a couple of attempts to get into a decent focus. In this circumstance, I was quite close to the subject. There is a manual focus facility which is operated with the multi function control. It works OK in controlled conditions, but would be a little slow in the event that the subject was moving. To my mind, I think it is an oversight not to provide a remote release facility. With 624mm of throbbing focal length, I would have to use a tripod and with a tripod, I like to use a remote release. It is true that no other compact digital cameras provide the feature either, but why not? Digiscopers have had to develop grips and frames and pushers and pressers in order to achieve what is really a very simple function if built in at the design stage.
I was unaware of a time lag between pressing the button and the shutter releasing. This used to be a dreadful problem, but the Nikon Coolpix P90 appears to have bettered it.
There is sill an issue with the power saving mode. (The battery supplied with the camera is a l-ion and much better than AAAs. Thank you very much to Wendy from Best Buy, Dadeland, for charging the battery for me. It took more than 200 pictures today without showing a power alert.) An SLR will reboot instantaneously when required to take a picture. The P90 took a few moments, but it was reasonably quick compared with other compacts.
I haven’t tried the video facility yet. Maybe I will open an account at Utube when I do.
On the whole, I like it and I think it is good value for money. Will it replace my SLR and lenses? No I don’t think so, unless I become too old and tired to carry that much stuff about. It lacks the immediacy of the SLR and the “hands on” feel of the slide zoom and manual focus ring. Will some of my lenses be consigned to the shelf or the lots at E-bay? Probably not. It will probably just end up as even more weight carried in my rucksack.

Portugal

This week I have been in Portugal with my family. Stolen moments during siesta have produced some results for my burgeoning dragonfly list with 6 lifers.
We were staying at Meia Praia in Lagos in the western Algarve. Betweeen our hotel and the beach is an area of dunes. A boardwalk ensures as much as possible that the dunes receive a small level of protection from the eager feet making for the beach. Grass and plants growing from the dunes provided perches for a good number of Red-veined Darters. They even came up to our pool area and I was able to watch them from my sunbed.

Close to Lagos is a small town called Alvor. It has a sanctuary which I hoped would have a freshwater section for the odes, but I had to make do with a tiny hole about 4m by 3m. It was a dribble that was used to water a tied-up horse, but it was permanent and just big enough to hold odonata. In fact, I was surprised by the number of species in such a small microcosm.
First and most obvious was a Broad Scarlet. It caused me much confusion as I did not think the abdomen was broad enough at first. Also, there were some black markings on the abdomen which my field guide told me there should not be. I found a tiny Iberian Bluetail quietly resting among the bank-side vegetation while I waited for a good picture of the scarlet. The Epaulet Skimmer caused me some ID issues as well. He is supposed to only rarely settle on the ground, yet this one seemed to prefer the ground to perching on any of the numerous available raised vantage points. The pinched abdomen was very obvious and I ended up wondering why I doubted myself.
The Lesser Emperor put in a fleeting performance, not settling at all, but the striking yellow band at the top of the abdomen was clear to see even with the naked eye.

A short drive from Lagos is the Baragem da Bravura, a large dam. Below the dam at the base of the wall a tiny dribble provides enough water for life to exist in the deeper holes of the outflow stream. Again, the profusion of odonata in such a small area surprised me. All of the anisoptera were repeated here and the new one was the Violet Dropwing. I was especially pleased to see this one as I recalled one catching my attention on a previous trip to Portugal. Not wanting to tick it retrospectively without any supporting evidence, it was worth the long climb up and down the wall of the dam.

The Lesser Emperor was again restless and did not seem inclined to stop for a picture until I saw one across the puddle, settle on a stalk.