Description
A damselfly clinging to a green stem at Oaks Bottom, turquoise and black along the thorax, gold flecks at the wing bases, one green eye catching a highlight. The wings are folded back and lit well enough to read every vein.
That turquoise is the reason I kept shooting this one, and it is worth knowing that most of it is not paint.
It is structural color. A great deal of the blue and turquoise in damselflies comes not from pigment but from microscopic layered structures in the cuticle that interfere with light and scatter particular wavelengths back at you. There is no blue substance to scrape off. The color is a property of the architecture, in the same way that a soap bubble or a peacock feather is colored.
Which is why it shifts as the animal turns, why it has that faint metallic quality, and why photographs of damselflies taken from slightly different angles can look like different species. It is also why the color survives in museum specimens long after real pigments would have faded.
Now look near the tip of each wing, at the leading edge, where there is a small dark rectangular cell. That is the pterostigma, and it is a beautiful piece of engineering.
It is a small mass of heavier tissue, deliberately placed out near the wingtip. A thin wing beating quickly is prone to flutter — an unstable oscillation that wastes energy and can tear the wing apart. That little weight damps the flutter and lets the insect glide faster and more efficiently than it otherwise could. Aircraft designers solve the same problem with mass balances on control surfaces. The damselfly has had one since long before we thought of it.
And the wings themselves are unusual. Most insects flap by deforming the whole thorax, which forces all the wings to move together. Damselflies and dragonflies have muscles attached directly to each wing, so all four can be driven independently. That is what allows the hovering, the sudden stops, the sideways drift, and in dragonflies even flying backwards. It is an older design than the one most insects use, and nothing has improved on it.
They are graceful, deliberate flyers, slower than dragonflies, and I find them in the long grass along the lake shore in the late evening.
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. Of the damselflies here this one has the strongest color, and it prints beautifully at square format.
What you’ll receive: a high-resolution JPEG, approximately 3200 × 3200 pixels — a true square, sharp enough to print at full photo quality up to about 10.5 inches on a side at 300 DPI, and larger at normal wall viewing distances. 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.