Shadow exuvia, Alton Jones

Most of my daily walks are, for better or worse, done alone, but at least a couple of blessed times a year, I get to trek with a group of splendid field teachers at URI's Environmental Education Center on the W. Alton Jones campus in West Greenwich. Ostensibly, I'm there to teach them, or, at least, imbue them with what I'm told is expertise about and enthusiasm for the natural world. I hope I meet expectations, but, in truth, I'm there for quite the opposite: them teaching me... and convincing me, every walk, that the natural world is in great hands. Still, in between all the identifications I couldn't quite remember—senility is all too rapidly approaching—I was able to impart a few new things, one of which was this exuvia, the beautiful cast larval skin of what I'm pretty sure, since I've seen them here before, was a Shadow Darner dragonfly. The adults were nowhere to be observed, but they'd left exquisite evidence of their larval history in Bubbling Spring.