Spatterdock Darner, Bell Cedar

If your knee-jerk reaction to yet another dragonfly image is, well, Dear God in Heaven, can't the naturalist shoot anything else? bear with me. This odonate is so drop-dead gorgeous that even the most dragonfly-blase viewers will find this guy absolutely arresting, its intense blue eyes in particular. I haven't had its identity confirmed by an expert yet, but based on the field guides I own and an intense search of Internet images, I'm pretty sure it's a Spatterdock Darner. Aeshna mutata is not, it turns out, on our state's rarities list, as it is in Massachusetts, but it's pretty uncommon. I had never seen one, and when the intense color jumped out at me from the Spatterdock's perch on a Mountain Laurel in full bloom at the back of the cemetery in the Bell Cedar Swamp refuge, I almost dropped the camera. The ode is that stunning and, happily, that cooperative.