With the Mountain Laurels starting to put on a show in the backyard, I decided to visit another Laurel stronghold, this one up the road in the Bell Cedar Swamp preserve, to see if I could find a blue-eyed stunner odonate known as the Spatterdock Darner. Of course, the idea that I would just walk over to a patch of Laurels and be greeted by that gorgeous and rare ode was ludicrous... I knew that... and yet, well, hope does spring eternal... especially because it's still spring. But the darner wasn't to be found, and neither, it turned out, was a plethora of Laurel blossoms. However, as I scanned the understory shrubs for anything intriguing, I was taken aback by what I assumed was a pair of Yellow Jackets in, um, flagrante. I know it sounds more than a little perverse-bordering-on-perverted, but watching mating behavior is an eternal source of natural history intrigue, and when critter sex is mixed with danger, as I feared the risk of interrupting copulation in wasps had to be, I watched, rapt, from a distance... and was ready to start running if the Yellow Jackets became annoyed and hostile. Except, as I realized the more I observed the pair, these weren't Yellow Jacket but rather a very artful mimic belonging to a group of insects known collectively as Syrphids. These, I would learn from a splendid online resource, the Field Guide to the Syrphidae of Northeastern North America, belong to the wasp-mimic genus Temnostoma. Canadian uber-Syrphid-expert Jeff Skevington and one of the field guide's authors was good enough to give me a more precise ID: Temnostoma excentrica, a.k.a., the Black-spotted Falsehorn.