Quidditas

Net in hand, I went to the prairie to look deliberately for Ruby Meadowhawks. At the edge of the prairie, I netted a male White-faced Meadowhawk. Farther out on the prairie, several hundred yards from the last trees, I netted a male Ruby Meadowhawk. I've found them here every year for the last eight years.

This preference in habitat for open prairie contributes to their quidditas, that which makes it the kind of thing that it is. This is just one of a combination of characters and behaviors that makes the mature male Ruby Meadowhawks recognizable in the field. They are also noticeably larger than the closely related White-faced and Cherry-faced Meadowhawks. On the open plains west of the Mississippi River, the wings of the male Ruby Meadowhawks have extensive amounts of color in the basal halves of their wings. This makes them easy to identify, instantly recognizable. Though I must admit I often feel I'm alone in this opinion; most everyone else professes that meadowhawk identification is intractable, not worth the trouble.

I, too, battled an early bewilderment with the red dragonflies. The first Ruby Meadowhawk I caught I submitted to the Minnesota Odonata Survey Project as a Band-winged Meadowhawk (because of the color in the wings). The path forward wasn't clear. For instance, the guide book I used at the time contained mistakes and misidentified images: of the three photographs on the Ruby Meadowhawk page none were of Ruby Meadowhawks! Luckily I had a net, a microscope, and steady populations of red dragonflies nearby to study.

Posted on August 7, 2017 03:39 AM by scottking