Chris Lewis and I had such a great time dragon-hunting in Gatineau last weekend that on June 25th we decided to hit several spots west of Ottawa to search for several local and unique species. On our list of locations were the Quyon Ferry Dock near Fitzroy to look for big river species, Morris Island for clubtails and skimmers, and Pakenham, Blakeney and Almonte for Rapids Clubtail. Before heading out to the Quyon Ferry Dock we stopped in at the fields near Constance Bay to look for Upland Sandpipers. We got lucky and found four. Not only did we see a couple of them flying over the fields, giving their distinctive call, we found one standing right on the shoulder of the road! Unfortunately we caused it to flush before I could get a photo of this bird; I still have yet to photograph this species. Indeed, this was the closest I’ve ever come to one of an Upland Sandpiper, which are difficult to find as they breed and feed in dry grasslands rather than muddy shorelines.
The day after the excellent snaketail adventure in Gatineau Park, I headed over to Jack Pine Trail to see if any of its unique dragonflies were on the wing. Two years ago I found a healthy population of Brush-tipped and Williamson’s Emeralds, and Arrowhead Spiketails are regularly seen along the stream at the back. Although I’d heard that it takes four years for Williamson’s Emerald larvae to mature, I had hopes of at least finding the Brush-tipped Emerald; I still think it’s amazing that all these wonderful dragonflies live and breed so close to home. I was also hoping to find some spreadwings, as I’ve seen both Northern and Emerald Spreadwings along the trails here in the past – though none in the past couple of years.
While at the Dunlop Picnic area, Chris and I got a call from Chris Traynor saying that he was on his way up to Meech Lake. Chris Lewis and I were on our way there next, and it didn’t take him long to catch up with us as we were walking down the large hill to the lake, listening to the vireos and a Blackburnian Warbler singing. Our destination was the waterfall at the old Carbide Wilson ruins where we hoped to find the snaketails Chris T. had reported seeing earlier in the week. However, first we spent some time exploring the shore of the lake where we found Powdered Dancers, a Chalk-fronted Corporal, and a couple of clubtails on logs too far from shore to identify. It was too early for the Slaty Skimmers to be flying; these dark blue dragonflies are one of my personal favourites, but we saw more than enough other species to make up for their absence.
When Chris Lewis suggested a dragon-hunting excursion on Saturday, I was eager to go. We had to make the extremely difficult choice between Morris Island/Fitzroy Harbour and Gatineau Park, but as Chris Traynor had recently found all sorts of amazing odes at Gatineau Park (including Maine Snaketail, Riffle Snaketail, Mustached Clubtail, Dragonhunter, Horned Clubtail, Dusky Clubtail, Lancet Clubtail, Beaverpond Clubtail and Eastern Least Clubtail) earlier in the week, we decided that a morning in Quebec sounded much more appealing. I met her at her place, and with the assistance of Siri, we navigated the Gatineau Park road closures up to the Sugarbush Trail with none of the frustration I encountered the previous week.
On the first day of June I brought my camera to work with me and headed over to Hurdman at lunch, hoping to find some interesting butterflies and odes to photograph. Hurdman can be a very “buggy” place, so I was sure to find something interesting; at that time I still hadn’t seen my first damselflies of the year, and Hurdman is a great spot to find Eastern Forktails, Elegant Spreadwings, Powdered Dancers, Stream Bluets and Rainbow Bluets during the month of June. However, with the closure of the transitway between Hurdman and Laurier stations, as well as the detours and increased traffic on Nicholas Street resulting from the sinkhole on Rideau Street, it now takes much longer to get there so I am no longer able to spend as much time there on my lunch hour as I would like. Getting around downtown has become and adventure, and timely bus schedules have become the first casualty of all the construction.
After leaving Sarsaparilla Trail I drove over to the NCC parking lot on Corkstown Road and followed the bike path beneath the Queensway to the place where Chris Traynor had seen the Eastern Red Damsels earlier in the week. The spot isn’t hard to find; just keep following the path parallel to the Queensway as it passes over a small bridge and skirts the northern edge of a farmer’s field. Eventually the path reaches a small woodlot and abruptly turns south; before you get to the small stand of trees, watch for an NCC sign on the left about the crops of the Greenbelt. Chris had found the damselflies in the grass behind the sign.
When I decided to take today off it wasn’t my intention, in the beginning, to embark on an all-out “dragon blitz” and search for as many odonate species as possible (or at least as many as I could find until my stamina began to falter); the forecast for the weekend looked terrible, so I wanted to go out while the weather was nice to look for birds in the morning and odes as soon as it warmed up. However, that’s exactly what it became as I started finding some good dragonflies early in the morning and decided to keep visiting different trails where I knew I could find different species.
My morning began with a visit to Lime Kiln Trail, which isn’t a place I visit very often. However, a Mourning Warbler has been heard singing away there for a couple of days now, and I thought I would try to find it. My walk started out fairly quiet, but I saw a Veery on the ground and a Common Raven flying overhead right near the beginning of the trail, and heard a couple of Red-eyed Vireos and a Brown Creeper in the woods.
On the first Saturday in June I made plans to meet Chris Traynor at the parking lot of the Sugarbush Trail in Gatineau Park to look for dragonflies. He has re-named this trail the “Clubtail Trail” due to the large number of clubtails that breed there, and I was eager to find some new species for my life list. Unfortunately our last visit there wasn’t terribly productive due to the overcast skies; the weather on Saturday was much nicer, sunny and warm even in the morning.
As we weren’t planning to meet until 9:00 am, I stopped by Sarsaparilla Trail first to check out the birds there. This turned out to be a fantastic idea as I heard a Least Bittern calling somewhere in the reeds to the north of the boardwalk and a Virginia Rail grunting somewhere on the south side. Other species included Brown Creeper, Eastern Wood-Pewee, Great Crested Flycatcher, Eastern Kingbird, a couple of Tree Swallows, a Marsh Wren singing in the reeds at the end of the boardwalk (the same one from last year?), a couple of Yellow Warblers, a White-throated Sparrow, and two Purple Finches.
The weather was supposed to be warm and sunny yesterday, so I headed out to the Bill Mason Center to look for marsh birds and dragonflies. Chris Traynor had found a Crimson-ringed Whiteface at the sand pit early in the season last year, and as I’ve never seen this species in Ottawa, I was curious to find out if his dragonfly was a chance visitor or if they were common there in the late spring. While this species has a flight season from late May to early August, I have never seen it there during any of my summer visits to the Bill Mason Center. I was also hoping to find a few marsh birds such as bitterns, Sora and Virigina Rail, so it seemed like a great idea to stop there after checking out the Carp Ridge and some of the roads in Dunrobin for other species.
On Victoria Day I returned to Mud Lake to look for migrants and dragonflies. I arrived early – before 7:00am – in order to beat the crowds, but even at that time there were a few people wandering around. I started at the ridge and worked my way around the conservation area in a clockwise direction; I hoped that by exploring the quieter side trails I would come up with a decent list for the morning. Well, I did finish my outing with a good number of bird species – 43 total – but most of them were found along the northern and western sides, which is where I usually bird anyway, especially when I am short on time.
By the third week of May the weather finally warmed up enough to do some dragon-hunting, so on May 21st I made plans with Chris Lewis and Jakob Mueller to go to Roger’s Pond in Marlborough Forest to look for birds, bugs and herps. We had great luck with all three, though mammals were sadly lacking. I’m not sure why I don’t see many mammals at this trail; the only one I can remember seeing with any certainty was a Snowshoe Hare right on the gravel trail as it ran by me.
On April 16th my fiancé Doran and I took our first trip outside of Canada and the U.S., spending the week in Cozumel, Mexico. We chose it because when we had originally been looking at going on a cruise, it was one of the destinations we particularly wanted to see because of the Mayan ruins close by, and a one-day stop didn’t seem like enough time to see the region. I was also interested in the wildlife there, though that would have been true of any destination!
We flew from Montreal to Atlanta at the ridiculous hour of 5:45am, having driven from Ottawa the night before and staying at the Marriott in the terminal. It was after 11:00pm by the time we went to bed, and I didn’t sleep a wink – we had to get up at 3:00am for the flight. From Atlanta we flew to Cozumel, arriving at 1:30pm. It was very hot and humid, and I was completely overdressed in my jeans and long-sleeved sweater. We passed through customs and security without any problems despite the long line and arrived at our hotel (the El Cozumeleno Beach Resort in the northern hotel zone) by 2:00.
The end of September is a good time to see a variety of hover flies (also known as flower flies, syrphid flies, or syrphids). It is also the end of dragonfly season. Most odonates are already done for the season – only a handful of species will continue flying into October, with the last species, Autumn Meadowhawk, flying into November if the weather cooperates.
As the last week of September was still quite warm, I was able to find and photograph a few different species of both insects – even in my own backyard! I finally added Autumn Meadowhawk to my official yard list on September 19th. I’ve seen a few meadowhawks in my yard over the years, but have only identified White-faced Meadowhawk and Band-winged Meadowhawk so far. I found it on the asters at the back of the yard, although it flew up onto the fence when I tried to get closer for a photo. Given how abundant and widespread it is, the Autumn Meadowhawk was the most likely species to be added to my yard list. Now that it has shown up in my yard, I’m not sure what the next likeliest species is – Common Green Darner? Twelve-spotted Skimmer?
In July 2011, I photographed a large Arigomphus dragonfly at Petrie Island. It had greenish eyes, a dark abdomen with rusty-coloured spots on the bottom of the last couple of segments, and an entirely yellow tenth segment. I only got two photos of the clubtail before it flew off, but the two angles showed that there was no black on the sides of the final abdominal segment. According to my research, only one species in Ontario has an entirely yellow tenth segment – the Unicorn Clubtail, a southern species that wasn’t even on the Ottawa checklist. Based on my photographs, which show the completely yellow tenth segment, a few of Ottawa’s most knowledgeable students of the odonata concluded that it could only be a Unicorn Clubtail – a new record for the region, and the 123rd species observed in the Ottawa area.
Unicorn Clubtail
Unicorn Clubtail
In July 2012, I was part of a team of dragon-hunters which went looking for this species at Petrie Island. The team included Bob Bracken, Chris Lewis, and Mike Tate. Bob and I spotted a large Arigomphus dragonfly, and I took one quick photo before he tried to net it. His attempt failed, and this photo is the only record we have of that 2012 clubtail. Again the image shows an entirely yellow tenth segment.
Unicorn Clubtail
In June 2015, Chris Traynor and another member of the OFNC Facebook group photographed Arigomphus dragonflies with what appeared to be entirely yellow tenth abdominal segments west of Ottawa. It seemed strange for the Unicorn Clubtails to pop up suddenly in the west end, especially since there had been no Unicorn Clubtail sightings anywhere in the region since 2012. Chris Lewis, Chris Traynor and I decided to post our photos to the Northeast Odonata Faceboook Group, which includes many prominent members of the Dragonfly Society of the Americas, several professional writers, bloggers, and authors, and other really knowledgeable dragonfly enthusiasts who have been studying these insects a lot longer than Chris, Chris, and I have.
After studying the images I posted, Ed Lam, the author of Damselflies of the Northeast: A Guide to the Species of Eastern Canada & the Northeastern United States (2004), noted that the cerci (upper claspers of the terminal appendages) appear shorter than the epiproct (the lower appendage) in the photos, which supports the similar-looking Lilypad Clubtail (A. furcifer) rather than Unicorn Clubtail (A. villosipes). He then took the time to photograph these two species with the appendages in the exact same position as the ones in my photos. The resulting diagram he put together was conclusive:
Arigomphus appendages (by Ed Lam)
Not only are the upper claspers shorter than the lower clasper, they are even the same shape with a heavy downward arch.
In the Facebook discussion, Chris Lewis responded with the comment that “structure rules again” – that is, structure is more important than colour or pattern when it comes to identifying odes. She also asked about the extensive pale yellow colour on the tenth segment of the two dragonflies I photographed. According to the Algonquin field guide and other online resources, the Lilypad Clubtail has only an elongated yellow spot on top of the tenth segment- the sides of the segment are very dark. She asked Ed if the extent of the paleness down the sides was variable in both species. Ed answered that in his experience, the amount of darkness on those last segments is variable on both Lilypad and Unicorn Clubtails.
So there it is – there are no Unicorn Clubtails in Ottawa (that we know of), and the next time someone spots a clubtail with an entirely yellow tenth segment, it’s best to check the shape and size of the claspers, as these are the most reliable field marks for identifying an odonate to species.
Author’s Note: Many thanks go to Ed Lam for the use of the image comparing the claspers of each species, and for his helpful comments on Northeast Odonata. Even though I lost a lifer, I gained a lot of knowledge about these two species and how to differentiate them. This knowledge will hopefully serve me well in the years to come, and is worth more than a tick on a checklist. Though it was kind of cool having a first Ottawa record while it lasted…! 🙂
I had a fabulous outing in Stony Swamp this morning. I started the morning by birding at Sarsaparilla Trail where I found a pair of Pied-billed Grebes and a Merlin perched in one of the dead trees at the north end of the pond; it was so far off that I had to return to the car and get my scope to identify it. I was glad I had brought my scope, for as I was scanning the vegetation along the shoreline I discovered two heron species skulking at the edge of the pond: a tiny Green Heron poised on a log, and an American Bittern that was almost invisible in a gap in the reeds! It made me wonder what other birds were present, going about their lives while remaining hidden from view.
OdoNotations 