Description
A pair of damselflies in the wheel on a stem of yellow pea flowers at Oaks Bottom. He is above, turquoise and black, holding her behind the head with the claspers at the tip of his abdomen. She is below, pale tan and cream, curled forward to reach the secondary genitalia tucked under the front of him.
If you have read the other mating photograph in this collection, this one is the useful companion to it — because in that frame both insects were blue, and here the difference is unmistakable.
This is what the sexes normally look like side by side. The male is doing the advertising: bright turquoise, high contrast, visible from a distance. The female is doing the opposite job in soft tan and cream, because she is the one who will shortly be sitting still at the waterline cutting slits into plant stems to lay eggs, entirely exposed while she works. You almost never get the two color schemes in one frame like this, which is the only reason I am laboring the point.
Two things about the position itself that I did not expect when I started watching them.
It can go on for a very long time. Depending on species, a pair may stay locked together for anything from a few minutes to well over an hour. That duration is not inefficiency — it is strategy. For as long as he stays attached, no rival male can reach her, so simply refusing to let go is itself a form of guarding.
And they can fly like this. The whole linked pair will lift off the stem and move to another perch without separating, steering as a single awkward two-headed animal. The first time you see it happen it looks like a mistake. It is not. It is how they relocate when disturbed, and it explains a lot of the odd blue shapes drifting over the shoreline grass on a summer evening.
The flowers, incidentally, are incidental. Damselflies take nothing from a bloom — no nectar, no pollen. This one is simply a convenient piece of architecture.
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.
What you’ll receive: a JPEG at approximately 2368 × 1822 pixels. I will be straight about this one: it is the smallest file in the damselfly collection, good for a print of about 8 × 6 inches at 300 DPI and fine somewhat larger at normal viewing distance, but it will not go on a wall the way the focus-stacked frames will. I am including it because the moment is worth having. 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.