Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Odonatidae

Common Green Darner

The family Odonatidae or Odonata, commonly called Odes is the family of Dragonflies, Damselflies and Allies.  Yes, I have taken a nose-dive straight into this awesome family of insects.  This is a whole new realm of creatures to ID. Not as much is known about ID of these insects as there is of birds and often, females and immatures cannot be readily identified.  It doesn't help that the only Dragonfly book for Wisconsin is currently out of print and unavailable.  My method of beginning to learn these winged creatures is to photograph everything I see and post it to Facebook. Inevitably, someone knows what the Ode is called. In essence, by doing so, I'm slowly building my own field guide to Dragonflies and Damselflies of southern Wisconsin. Hopefully I will have a pretty decent set of photos by the end of the season.

Here is what I have found and photographed so far that I know the ID to:

Immature female Eastern Forktail
 There are several little orange Damselflies in a family called Bluets. This one is a Forktail. I have yet to figure out why...



Midland Clubtail
  Clubtails are some of the more awesome Dragonflies. There are two species around here that look similar. Midland Clubtail and the more awesomely named Cobra Clubtail.

Midland Clubtails
It's always fun to see a mating pair of Dragonflies attempting to fly. They do it amazingly well.

Female Eastern Forktail
It's interesting how these Damselflies change colors depending on age. This is a female. I haven't found a male yet.


I haven't had a solid ID on this one yet, but it is probably Hagen's Bluet. The blue ones are so vivid!


Some Bluets can't be identified unless they're adults. This little green one is probably an Eastern Forktail, but is what is called Tenereal, meaning that it is newly hatched and still developing and cannot be identified to species.

Twelve-spotted Skimmer
This is perhaps one of my favorite Dragonflies and is one of the more spectacular ones as it really stands out as it flies by.  I usually see these while canoeing along rivers and streams.

Ebony Jewelwing
By far one of the most beautiful of the Damselflies (is it a Damselfly?) Ebony Jewelwing is an inhabitant of the deep forest shadows. They're awesome to see in flight and just glow when they land. I love the beautiful metallic sheen.


Keep checking back for updates throughout the summer. I'm trying to post on this blog more often now that I have lots of new things to share.

Book Review: Hawks at a Distance




Anyone who has participated in a hawk-watch knows how difficult raptors can be to ID.  It's more difficult still to learn how to do it. It's almost impossible to put that knowledge into a book. However, well known hawk guru Jerry Ligouri has done it. His new book "Hawks at a distance" is an excellent book to have with you when out hawkwatching or even just casual observation.  

In this book, the photos are just what the title says: at a distance. They are not close up, they are not cropped down, but left to replicate how you might see a hawk through your binoculars in the field.  
As with the Crossley guide, impressions are best here. What is your impression of shape and size? What field marks would you pick out if you saw this bird in the field? 

Let's take a look inside the cover: 


Ligouri starts each species account with a brief, one or two page segment of text followed by photos: 


The photos, as expected, are literally "at a distance." They show the bird as one might see it in the field.  
Take this Swainson's Hawk. What, to you, says it's a Swainson's Hawk? How might that be used in the field?  Those dark flight feathers show up pretty distinctly.  
Like Crossley, Ligouri dispenses with pages and pages of text and keeps the text to a minimum. This allows you as the reader to determine what works for you to identify the bird. 
Though my scan of the page doesn't show it, the photos in this book are beautiful and well chosen to fit every imaginable instance where you might see the bird in flight out in the field. 

The newest field guides seem to be taking this stance.  The new school of birding seems to be based on impressions and shape.  New I say? Well, not exactly new, just coming around again. 
There are two schools of birding. One is based on careful observation of detailed field marks to identify the bird. The other is based on GISS. What is GISS? General Impression of Shape and Size. Sure, there's more that goes into it than that, but that's the basic idea.  
There are many field guides out there that use detailed field marks and carefully explain what those marks are and how to look for them. It's fairly easy to learn bird identification this way. The problem comes when a lot of birds, hawks in particular, are just too far away, and often in bad light, to use this method.  The newest guides, the Crossley and now Ligouri's book are exploring methods of teaching identification at long range using only impressions of shape, size and behavior.  With more and more of these books coming out, the well-rounded birder would be wise to study both as it provides a whole other face to bird identification. 

Ligouri even goes the full step to ID by shape by providing a page of nothing but silhouettes: 


Views of the bird from every angle as you might see it in the field, backlit against the sun.  

Interestingly, all the photos in this book show the bird in flight. The assumption being that if the bird is perched, you can get close enough to it to ID it by field marks alone.  
I would however be interested to see if we eventually get a book that tells us how to ID perched hawks from over a mile away. 

In all, I would say Ligouri's book is one for anyone wishing to learn to ID all those raptors they see floating on the horizon.  As Pete Dunne says in his excellent Foreword "Now that Hawks at a Distance is available to today's "students of birds," the world beyond the horizon is about the only place that a raptor that aspires to remain anonymous can hope to hide."