Late meadowhawk, Henne

One of my favorite, if a bit bittersweet, autumn monitoring tasks is to find and photograph the year's last Meadowhawk dragonflies. These red-brown, fairly small gems start to light up the sky in August and then, as their larger cousins either head south or just give up the collective ghost, the members of the Sympetrum clan eventually have the landscape entirely to themselves. By Indian Summer in November, the only odonate still on the wing will be one of several Meadowhawk species, each of them so similar to their cousins that it's prudent to lump them into one batch of bugs. I suppose I could collect them to be positive about identities—they're going to die soon enough anyway, so I'd just be hastening the inevitable—but I think some of them are still breeding and, perhaps, passing on one magical trick: the ability to withstand frost. We've had temps down to 27 already, which is serious cold for an insect, but at least a few Meadowhawks, somehow, have managed to laugh off the cold and continue to prosper. Maybe this is the last survivor... but maybe not. We shall see.