Out-of-order Interlude
Jun. 10th, 2003 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladeanI went outside this afternoon to feed the tomato plants. It's dim and cool and a little windy. After feeding the tomatoes I lingered, appreciating the dame's rocket and the exploding Henry Kelsey rose bush and the White Rose of York demurely competing with it while looking absentminded, and the great white pink-tinged peonies and the lively Shasta daisies and the unexpected new row of flowers on the bleeding-heart and -- what was that on the wall of the house?
It was a dragonfly. Not a meadowhawk nor a darner. It had a swelling at the base of its tail and a fancy body and tail pattern of yellow-green and black or dark-brown. Nothing unusual about the wings.
I raced upstairs and told Raphael, who came down with the camera and took a bunch of photos, getting closer and closer until the fairly obliging subject, which had been shivering its wings from time to time anyway, got annoyed and took off.
Raphael says it's a new species for us, Gomphus vastus, also called the cobra clubtail. "They're river guys," said Raphael, so maybe this one came from Minnehaha Creek.
I love our back yard, even when it produces mosquitoes, even when it is unmown and full of motherwort and buckthorn and Japanese knotweed and the mystery weed with long orange taproots and little laurel-looking purple flowers.
Pamela
It was a dragonfly. Not a meadowhawk nor a darner. It had a swelling at the base of its tail and a fancy body and tail pattern of yellow-green and black or dark-brown. Nothing unusual about the wings.
I raced upstairs and told Raphael, who came down with the camera and took a bunch of photos, getting closer and closer until the fairly obliging subject, which had been shivering its wings from time to time anyway, got annoyed and took off.
Raphael says it's a new species for us, Gomphus vastus, also called the cobra clubtail. "They're river guys," said Raphael, so maybe this one came from Minnehaha Creek.
I love our back yard, even when it produces mosquitoes, even when it is unmown and full of motherwort and buckthorn and Japanese knotweed and the mystery weed with long orange taproots and little laurel-looking purple flowers.
Pamela
