Description
A damselfly on the cut end of a branch at Oaks Bottom, with the light coming through its wings and turning them into sheets of oil-slick color — green, violet, gold, pink, all of it shifting across a membrane you could barely feel between your fingers.
There is no pigment in those wings at all. They are transparent.
What you are seeing is thin-film interference, the same effect that puts rainbows on a soap bubble or a film of petrol on a wet road. A damselfly wing is astonishingly thin — a couple of micrometers of clear membrane stretched over a frame of veins. Light reflects off the top surface and off the bottom surface, the two reflections travel very slightly different distances, and where they line up they reinforce a color and where they clash they cancel it.
Which is why the color slides around as the insect shifts, and why it only appears when the light is behind them. Ten degrees of camera movement and this photograph would have shown two panes of clear glass.
Something else here is worth flagging, because it breaks a rule I have repeated elsewhere in this collection.
The usual quick test is that a resting damselfly folds its wings back along its body while a dragonfly holds them open. Look at this one: the wings are held out to the side, half open. That is not a dragonfly — the widely separated eyes and the slender build settle that immediately.
There is a whole family called the spreadwings that perch exactly like this, wings held at an angle rather than closed, and they exist mainly to embarrass anybody who has just confidently explained the rule. I would not swear to the identification from a single frame — a damselfly will also open its wings briefly to warm up or just after landing — but it is a good reminder that field marks are strong tendencies rather than laws.
The perch is characteristic though. A cut stem end, out in the open, with a clear view all round: exactly the sort of platform these hunt from in the evening grass along the lake shore.
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 wing iridescence is the whole point of this one, and it needs a decent size to read properly.
What you’ll receive: a high-resolution JPEG, approximately 3616 × 2560 pixels — sharp enough to print at full photo quality up to about 12 × 8.5 inches 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.