12-spotted Skimmer female

As I walked past the doomed field across the street, I noticed, in what is still left of the meadow towards the still-shrubby west end of the "improvement," a swarm of dragonflies. I guess they don't yet know that they're no longer welcome, but it's now their time to gather in this place, just as they've done for decades, and with the tiny insects rising up out of the wild grasses, the large and often-migratory odonates are congregating in feeding swarms to fuel up in advance of traveling south. In years past, I've worked my way through the meadow in an attempt to photograph the fast-flying creatures, usually members of the Common Green Darner clan. It's most often an exercise in frustration, because the odes are too small for the camera's autofocus to lock in on and what I wind up with are blurs that bear just enough of the Common Green's green and blue colors to let me identify them. But, as I've noted before, sometimes you get lucky, and as I watched the swarm, some of whom were flying overhead in review, one of the odes landed nearby. I wasn't instantly sure of its identity as I fired off a series of pictures, save that it wasn't a Common Green. When I examined the images at home, field guides in hand, I had thankfully captured enough of the ode's important field marks to feel sure that it was a female 12-spotted Skimmer,  a lovely visitor I more typically see haunting the millpond.