A Little Wanderlust

Yesterday evening, the idea for a road trip suddenly overtook me. There exist two species in the dragonfly genus Williamsoni, the Ebony Boghaunter and the Ringed Boghaunter, both of which have been observed this month at a county park south of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, a mere two and a half hours from Northfield. Having never seen either, why not spend a day driving and try to find them? Curiously, within an hour of hatching this plan, I received an invitation via text to join members of the Minnesota Dragonfly Society on a survey next week of some bogs in northern Minnesota in search of these very species. Problem solved!

But then I set to work on a couple of loose ends in the text I began translating yesterday, simply checking a couple place names. On July 22, 1960, B. Belyshev happened upon a mass emergence of Yellow-winged Darters (Sympetrum flaveolum) at a dry temporary pond, so dry in fact that digging a hole 1.5 meters deep he failed to find water. How had the nymphs survived these conditions? After searching the grass where the exuvia and emerging dragonflies were found and after searching through the dried silt in the pond bottom, no nymphs could be found. "Finally, attention was drawn to lumps of almost completely dead moss scattered across the bottom of the dried up pond. In these damp (due to the absorption of atmospheric moisture) but not wet, mossy clusters, nymphs of the Yellow-winged Darter were found. They were in excellent condition: mobile, energetic and able to run quickly over the dry ground, which is so very unlike their slow crawling along the bottom in an aquatic environment."

Early in this account, Belyshev gives the location as the Tunka Basin, a large geological area west of the southern end of Lake Baikal. But later he adds more specific detail about the habitat, that the ponds are located in "an old channel of the Irkut River near the town of Tibelti." Amazingly, using Google Maps, one can follow the Irkut River through the Tunka Basin to the town of Tibelti and even see the abandoned ox-bow adjacent to the town containing several ponds.

After all this virtual travel, a little wanderlust resurfaced and pulsed once more in my veins. I headed out to look for dragonflies. Johnny Cash's song 'Drive On' on queue in the cd player. The first bluet damselflies of the year were found at Circle Lake where teneral Tule Bluets perched in the lakeside grass. A little further on down the road, at Boyd Sartell WMA, mature male bluets cruised the surface of the small ponds, giving me my first look at the "blue" of the bluet damselflies this year. These were Boreal Bluets. Two other odonatological firsts for the year: a Twelve-spotted Skimmer and an Eastern Pondhawk.

Posted on May 26, 2017 04:02 AM by scottking