After running out of birds to chase down, I wanted a new challenge. Go after dragonflies, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.
Dragonflies and damselflies are so much harder than birds. They are tiny. They fly faster than my disease-ravaged eyes can possibly track. They often do not stay perched for very long. They don’t sing, so one cannot go “ode-ing by ear”. The online repositories of sightings and reports are lean and not that helpful. And the striking odonates that we are so eager to see are downright scarce, even when we travel to the locales and habitats recommended by local experts.
So as our odonate lifer count grows very slowly, we are quickly compiling a list of nemesis bugs.
And then, more often than not, when we do finally find something interesting, it is a teneral. These provide a maddening trade-off: many cannot yet fly, so they are often right there on the ground in front of you, and you can take as many up-close photos as you want. Then you load those images onto your PC and stare at them for hours to arrive at no conclusive idea of what on earth you are looking at.
These brand new adult dragonflies have not yet developed the distinctive color patterns which are so integral to getting an ID. They look nothing like the insects illustrated in the field guides. You have to really use your imagination, and that can leads to all kinds of problems. A birding analogy might be finding a nestling nowhere near a nest and with no parents around.
The other day, we spent an hour or two with a teneral on the shores of Spring Lake, which is part of the Mississippi River southeast of St. Paul. It was clearly a clubtail, and was very cooperative in terms of its behavior, walking right up onto our fingers so we could get closer looks without risking damage to the delicate teneral wings.
You won’t find anything like that in either the Lam or Paulson field guides. Online searching for images of tenerals of specific species is rather laborious, untrustworthy, so that provides no definitive help either. That faint marks that you can sort of resolve become like Rorschach ink blots after a while.
What I would give for a Field Guide to Odonate Tenerals.
So what can one key off of if the colors are not developed and the patterns are not clear? Range, habitat, and morphology seem like valid options. After accounting for the first two as best we could, we focused on the claspers on the end of the tail.
We narrowed our guesses down to four of the Clubtails that are found here: Russet-tipped, Cobra, Elusive, and Midland. We desperately wanted this to be a Cobra, as the others are species that we have already found (although the Elusive, located last year along the shore of the Mississippi, was of course an equally nondescript teneral that needed expert help for identification and was equally exasperating).
Below are the relevant clasper diagrams reproduced from Lam (center top, detailed drawings) and Paulson (simpler line drawings). What we found disturbing here is the variation (compare the two different diagrams for the Cobra as seen from above) plus the fact that these are claspers… they clasp. They move. How much variation can one expect to see? How flexible are they? We certainly saw some variation from looking at different photos of the same species.
In the end, we had to settle on Russet-tipped, which was disappointing, as we had found adults of these last year (and unlike all the other clubtails we have come across, they were actually not uncommon). Here is a comparison of the teneral and an adult Russet-tipped Clubtail I photographed last year, showing the dramatic difference:
Of course, we could have collected the teneral and had experts eventually examine it, but we’ve wanted to keep our enjoyment of these insects non-destructive. Simply getting to have them in hand is such a nice change from birding. But the price for that is all of the attendant difficulties of merely finding them, capturing them, and then trying to identify them. And so, for this ode, after many hours in the field and hours looking at these images and consulting the books, I’m still not sure we got the ID right. We were hoping for a lifer, but instead got another life lesson about how challenging these little creatures can be.