Common Green Darner

For the past few years, I've had the chance to spend a good part of one late-summer day at the University of Rhode Island's W. Alton Jones campus to work with the incoming group of environmental educators charged with teaching many of Rhode Island's middle schoolers about nature. I take the teachers out for treks to various habitats in the West Greenwich woods and we talk about what we find and how best to present it. As we were exploring a meadow in the hopes of spotting some Monarch Butterfly caterpillars on the milkweed, we noticed a swarm of Common Green Darner dragonflies working the air for brunch. One of the Common Greens decided to take a break from this work and rest on a twig. This is a rare treat, I told the teachers, since this species is mostly seen only in quick, fly-by glimpses. The cooperative, or maybe just tired, ode even let us pull down its resting place to group eye-level, so we could observe its eye anatomy and that miraculous "third eye," which is actually a bull's eye pattern on its forehead. I hope the dragonflies are similarly obliging when the kids are in residence.