silvered wings

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This is an aggressive little thing. A second dragonfly species has joined the blue dashers at the Plaza Pond at Ijams Nature Center.

The eastern pondhawk can and will catch and consume larger prey, sometimes even other pondhawks. If fences make good neighbors, then these guys need a fence or two. The females are green (as in photo) the males blue.

I think pilot John Gillespie Magee's poem is about flying a plane, but perhaps it can apply to being a dragonfly:

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of -- Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.

- Photo taken at Ijams Nature Center

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