Description
A male damselfly head-on at Oaks Bottom, electric blue against a soft green field, perched on a purple flower bud still beaded with dew. Both eyes toward the lens, wings swept back, the whole animal about the thickness of a matchstick.
The color tells you it is a male. In most of our blue damselflies the males wear this brilliant sky blue with black banding, while the females are considerably duller — olive, brown or dusty green — and are so much less conspicuous that people rarely photograph them. If you have only ever noticed the bright blue ones, you have been seeing roughly half the population.
The markings on top of the head, just behind the eyes, are worth knowing too. Those small pale spots are postocular spots, and their shape and whether they join up is one of the standard ways to separate the various bluets from each other. It is a fiddly business best done from a photograph, which is a decent argument for carrying a camera.
And here is the thing about that flower.
He is not visiting it. Damselflies take no nectar and no pollen; they have no interest whatsoever in what the bloom is offering. He is using it as a hunting platform — a high, stable perch with a clear view over the surrounding vegetation, from which to watch for small insects and launch after them.
Which is a good illustration of how easy it is to misread a photograph. This looks exactly like a pollinator picture. It is a picture of a predator sitting in a hide.
They are graceful, deliberate flyers, slower than any dragonfly, and I find them in the long grass along the shore of the lake in the late evening. Move slowly and they simply carry on. Of all the insects I photograph, damselflies are the most willing to be looked at.
This is a high-resolution digital download of the photograph, made at Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge in Portland, Oregon — yours to print for your home or office, set as a wallpaper, or simply keep. The true square format and the clean green background make this one hang particularly well beside other square prints.
What you’ll receive: a very large JPEG, approximately 4096 × 4096 pixels — a true square, sharp enough to print at full photo quality up to about 13.5 inches on a side at 300 DPI, and considerably larger for wall display. Delivered as an instant download the moment your order is complete.
License: Personal use only. Print it for your own home, use it as a wallpaper or screen background, enjoy it yourself. Not licensed for commercial use, resale, redistribution, or AI training. © Jonathan Swanson / JonSwan Productions. All rights reserved.