Dragonfly brigade!

This morning while Jim and I were out at the gardens picking squash and cucumbers, and then pulling weeds in another garden we started to notice a few dragonflies flitting about.

When we got done with our gardening chores for the day we were relaxing on the west deck and commented on how there seemed to be a small contingency of dragonflies buzzing about.  We figured it must have been a dozen or so.  Jim said to them "go ahead and stick around, eat all the mosquitoes you want, we would love to have you get your fill and stay as long as necessary."  (or something like that)

My guess is that this small squadron was the recon group for the whole brigade.  They reported back to the dragonfly headquarters that there were indeed a lot of mosquitoes to be eaten on the farm and so preparations were made for a full campaign of feeding the whole brigade at dusk when the mosquitoes are active and plentiful.

This has to be what happened because as I was checking the clouds in the sky and seeing if any of these radar blips were going to bring rain or worse, hail, to the farm there were hundreds of dragonflies flying around, diving, swooping, like WWI flying aces in a dog fight to the death.  They would zoom past my head and straight over the roof of the house, in and out of the cedar trees, just zipping around all over the place.  It is like watching a beautifully choreographed ballet as each dragonfly has its own flight path and never do two collide or even come close to each other.  Nature really has some amazing formations and flights of fancy!

I tried to get pictures of them but they are just to fast and my shutter and camera are just to slow.  I would need one of those fancy cameras that can take high speed multiple shutter exposures in a minute to be able to capture a dragonfly in flight.  I am sure they were chasing down those pesky mosquitoes and gobbling them up as fast as they could.

Another sure sign that we are nearing the end of summer when the dragonflies are plentiful and the mosquito population is dwindled down (thank goodness).  What a wonderful way to end August!