Some of you (you know, you nonexistent readers,) will get that reference, while the rest eat at real restaurants and shouldn’t feel left out. Meanwhile, we have another image from the random pile.
This is a species of dragonfly known as a red saddlebags (Tramea onusta,) which I love – you could pop the common name on anyone and ask what kind of animal it was, and no one would ever come close, including probably a good number of entomologists. The name comes from those dark patches on the wings, which is only on the hindwings by the way, and determining the species showed a flaw in BugGuide’s information standards, specifically (and I’ve noticed this before) that they don’t really have them. I had to go through Ecosia to find that this was some variety of saddlebags, and then searching within BugGuide mostly brought up Carolina saddlebags, which specifically said that it’s very hard to tell apart from the similar species red saddlebags, especially in the field. However, when I checked out red saddlebags instead, they had two specific traits to spot (a clear gap in the brown portions of the wings near the body, and the amount of black on the abdomen) that pinned this down, almost certainly, to a red saddlebags. Again, not really sure how much it matters – I just try to be accurate if it’s at all possible.
We need a closer look at that wing detail.
I’d resized this for the blog just to show how those wing veins stood out, especially since this was shot with the 150-600mm lens handheld from 5-7 meters off, but the details revealed helped with the identification anyway – notice how the black on the tail tip is mostly on top and not wrapping around. Also notice that the head of the dragonfly, maybe 50mm past the focus point, has gone quite blurry; I didn’t choose the focus point, letting the autofocus decide, but it works in this case.