Arrowhead Spiketail

A year ago, I was walking along the edge of the field across the street and perched on the meadow grass was one of the most breathtakingly gorgeous dragonflies I'd ever seen. I took lots of pictures from just about every angle, and the collection gave me plenty of grist for the identification mill. I'd found an Arrowhead Spiketail, and it was one of those blessings: Cordulegaster obliqua is an uncommon species with a short flight season, and it wasn't really near its preferred habitat of semi-permanent streams and seeps. Sometimes, if you're out often enough, you get lucky.

On the anniversary of that serendipitous find, I got lucky again and spotted, in the woods, a remarkable Cordulegaster cousin.

Delta-spotted Spiketail

This one's called an Delta-spotted Spiketail, and though I found it in a sunny clearing filled with all sorts of odonates, it must have suitable habitat—small marshy streams and seeps—somewhere nearby. C.  diastatops is said, by Blair Nikula and company in their Massachusetts odonate guide, to be "fairly common" and have a longer flight season than the Arrowhead. So I'm going to make more trips to this clearing. The hunting is certainly good, and if the cranefly population holds up, I might be able to get more shots of a Delta-spotted.