On May 20th I received a photo of a large male emerald dragonfly from Chris Traynor. It was a teneral, with brown eyes and crisp, intact wings, but wasn’t so fresh that the wings had that glistening Saran-wrap look. The abdomen was long, thin and black, with an incomplete thin yellowish-white ring near the base. The message that accompanied the photograph was brief: “Don’t have my book. Any ideas?”
It was a drizzly day, only about 16°C, and not many dragonflies were flying yet – I’d just seen my first dragonflies of the season the day before, and they were the usual suspects for the middle of May: American Emerald, Four-spotted Skimmer, and Dot-tailed Whiteface. The faint whitish ring at the top of the abdomen of Chris’s dragonfly as well as the early date had me thinking American Emerald, even though the shape of the abdomen seemed wrong. Also, I had never seen an American Emerald with an intense amber wash on its wings, although I have to admit that I’ve never seen one with such a uniformly pale background behind it before, either – it looked like his dragonfly was on the side of a house, while the American Emeralds I see are usually perching on leaves or branches or twigs just above the ground.
Chris didn’t think it was an American Emerald, and told me that this wasn’t among iNaturalist’s suggestions either – the abdomen was too long. I asked him what iNaturalist suggested, and he said Somatochlora, a genus of difficult-to-find emeralds that is the dragonfly equivalent to finding a Black-backed Woodpecker in winter or a Northern Goshawk (now American Goshawk) on a nest – not impossible, but not easy. He said he wished he had gotten a good side view but it was raining too hard, and he would have caught it if he had brought a net. ”It’s still there,” he texted me. ”On my mom’s front window”.
A Somatochlora emerald….on his mother’s house? I had visions of some nice country house out somewhere near the Richmond fen or Marlborough Forest, or maybe up in Wakefield on the Quebec side. Somatochlora emeralds – also known as the Striped Emeralds – are highly sought after by dragon-hunters and ode enthusiasts due to their general scarcity and highly specific habitats. They shun the marshy ponds inhabited by skimmers and pond clubtails, preferring instead near-inaccessible bogs, fens and forest streams where they are considered rare or local, but never common…just like the jewels they are named for. They don’t just show up on a house in the city. So I asked him “Where does your mom live?” And after thinking about it for a moment: “What Somatochlora are flying this early?”
Chris responded with an LOL. “In Nepean off of Greenbank. So 15 minutes from you.”
Wait, what??? Okay, so I wasn’t expecting that! Maybe Somatochlora emeralds sometimes do show up on random houses in the city! But out of all the houses in the area it just happened to choose one often visited by someone who can identify dragonflies?
I checked the OFNC’s online checklist of Ottawa Odonates to see which large Somatochlora emerald species flew in mid- or late May. We considered Kennedy’s Emerald, which looked similar in appearance, and Delicate Emerald, which is the only striped emerald flying in late May according to the checklist – although our information on local flight seasons is woefully incomplete on many species, and may not be entirely accurate.
Chris went back to his mother’s house and caught it to obtain some better views. His photos show that claspers are pincer-shaped, and not ski-tipped which ruled out the very rare Ski-tipped and uncommon Williamson’s Emeralds. Clamp-tipped and Forcipate Emerald were similarly ruled out by the shape of the claspers. We vacillated between Kennedy’s and Delicate Emeralds, but couldn’t settle on one ID or the other.
To our surprise the dragonfly was still on the window ledge the following morning. Chris messaged me to let me know, and I drove over to see it. Even without the signature green eyes it was a beauty. I took a few photos of it from a distance, afraid it would fly off. Then I cautiously moved closer, picked it up and got some photos in the hand. It is more difficult than it looks to get a clear shot of the claspers in the hand from both a side and top view; there is always some sort of shadow or issue with sharpness, as the bug may be uncooperative and either buzzing in my hand or curling and uncurling its abdomen. My photos didn’t seem to point at a specific ID: the claspers are similarly shaped in Kennedy’s and Delicate Emeralds, with the upper claspers (cerci) angling down and inwards toward each other. However, some online1 and print2 sources say that the tips almost meet in the Kennedy’s Emerald and are distinctly separated in the Delicate Emerald. This is completely opposite of what is shown in the Algonquin field guide3.
After I got my photos, I left the dragonfly on a sunny windowsill in the backyard where it would be able to warm up. Chris let me know the following day that it was gone, so hopefully it flew off and found its way to a more appropriate habitat!
After it was gone the debate continued. The dragonfly had black and amber spots at the base of its hindwings…Delicate has a prominent triangular black spot but Kennedy’s doesn’t. The clear, single yellow spot on the side of its thorax indicates that it emerged very recently, but both Delicate and Kennedy’s Emeralds have this spot, and it becomes obscured and less distinct with time. According to the Minnesota Dragonfly website, the yellow spot in the Kennedy’s Emerald is a stripe, while in the Delicate Emerald it is an oval dot….our fellow’s looked like, well, an exclamation mark. The wasp-thin third segment of the abdomen was the narrowest, while the last few segments were the widest which is suggestive of Kennedy’s. The Delicate Emerald has an abdomen that is equally narrow along its length, with segment 9 a tiny bit wider than the others.
The Delicate Emerald also has a proportionately longer abdomen, about 1.5 times as long as the wings, while in Kennedy’s Emerald the abdomen is 1.25 to 1.3 times as long as the wing. Taking measurements from our photos rather than the individual in our hand (because we didn’t know at the time that this would be a useful thing to do), the wing-to-abdomen ratio puts it well within the range of Kennedy’s Emerald. Finally, Kennedy’s Emerald has yellowish-brown patches low on the sides of segments 5 to 10, while the abdominal segments of the Delicate Emerald are entirely black.
Chris posted his photos to the Northeast Odonata group on Facebook where some of the most prominent names in the field of dragonfly study voiced their opinions. The votes between Delicate Emerald and Kennedy’s Emerald were about even. He also posted his images on Odonata Central where it was vetted as a Kennedy’s Emerald, and that’s the ID we are going with. A lifer for him but not for me, though I have only seen a female once before in Marlborough Forest. In retrospect, it seems that enough clues were pointing to Kennedy’s Emerald that we would have probably gotten there eventually, with some further research to gain more experience and familiarity with these two species.
Still, his mother’s house was a strange place to see a bog-loving emerald that normally lives in areas with a little less asphalt and concrete. It definitely had emerged recently, but where? Had it blown in from the Richmond Fen, or emerged someplace closer? Unless we discover more individuals of the same species in the area we will never know.
- Fischer, Jeffrey 2016. Minnesota Dragonfly website, accessed February 4, 2024, <www.mndragonfly.info>. ↩︎
- Paulson, Dennis (2011).Dragonflies and Damselflies of the East. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 538 pp. ↩︎
- Jones CD, Kingsley A, Burke P, Holder M. (2013) Field guide to the dragonflies and damselflies of Algonquin Provincial Park and the surrounding area (2nd edn). The Friends of Algonquin Park, Whitney, ON, 264 pp. ↩︎
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