Aurora Damselfly

It's late, I realize, but I started picking up the first odonates only yesterday. However, because of a camera problem—fixed, happily—I wasn't able to "capture" any. I did better this afternoon, during a trek to a neighbor's old field, a once gloriously unruly grassland that is now more manicured than I or any of the once-resident creatures would like. Still, it's not completely suburbanized, and on the groundcover underneath the lilacs, I noticed the first of this year's crop of damselflies that I could actually identify. At first glance, it was holding its wings out at a 45 degree angle from the abdomen—a position characteristic of a group of damsels known as Spreadwings. But the rest of the body and its colors didn't fit in with the fieldmarks of the Family Lestidae, and that quickly left only one likely candidate, the Aurora Damselfly. This one's a member of a different family, the Pond Damsels, a.k.a. Coenagrionidae, all of whom hold their wings close to and parallel to their abdomens—except, of course, the Aurora, which, like its namesake, is just identifiably different.