Dragonflies in Summer

by Kate Stockman

A few years ago, I decided to create an altered book depicting the things I love about summer: the ripeness, the abundance of scents and flowers, the birds and the bees. I found a wonderful book at a thrift store published by the Smithsonian and entitled The Fire of Life. I re-titled it “Summer Solstice.” Some of the pages I left as they were because they were about the summer solstice. Other pages, I altered by covering them with decorative papers, rubber stamp impressions, photos, postcards, calendar art, etc. I even took multi-page articles from magazines (such as article on the Monarch butterfly from an old National Geographic) and made them into booklets so that I created books within the books. It was a labor of love, and made the heat more tolerable.

The book contained many images of dragonflies since I associate them with summertime and warm weather. When I was young, my mother and I went to the cemetery where her mother was buried once a month on Saturday morning. While she trimmed around the gravestone (and I’m sure “talked” with her beloved mother), I walked, skipped and ran around, reading the grave markers and admiring the statues. I remember always seeing dragonflies hovering and flying around a large statue of an open bible. They were so beautiful and iridescent in the richest colors imaginable! They could hover, zip forward, glisten in the sun, and dart wherever they wanted.

As an adult, I remember being led by dragonflies down a country road in Tennessee. Andrew and I were looking for mountain land to buy where we could live when we retired. This was outside of Nashville and dragonflies literally led us down the road to the entrance to the property. While we didn’t buy that property, it was a procession to remember!

A few years ago, I was enjoying an afternoon swim in a nearby lake. Dogpaddling, I watched at eye level the dragonflies skimming above the water on their various missions. After my swim, I sat on the side of the dock and looked into the water. There, suspended beneath the surface were carp languidly watching me. Shifting my focus, I watched dragonflies busily zipping from cattail to tall grasses and through the air above the water’s surface. Shifting again, I saw my own reflection mirrored in the tranquil water’s surface. It was an aquatic epiphany:  deep below the surface was calm, above the surface was furiously active, and in between was me, watching it all.

In Native American medicine, Dragonfly symbolizes “Illusion”. According to the Jamie Sams and David Caron, the authors of Medicine Cards, “some legends say that Dragonfly was once Dragon, and that Dragon had scales like Dragonfly’s wings.” They advise you to call on Dragonfly if you need to make a change as Dragonfly will “guide you through the mists of illusion to the pathway of transformation.”

Dragonflies have been around for 300 million years. One prehistoric fossil had a wingspan of 2 1/2 feet, making it the largest flying insect ever recorded. Today, the largest dragonfly is found in Costa Rica with a wingspan of 7 1/2 inches.

Dragonflies and damselflies are similar. Both belong to the order of Odonata (the toothed ones). Dragonflies belong to the suborder of Anisoptera (uneven winged) and damselflies to the suborder Zygoptera (even winged). One way to tell them apart: dragonflies hold their wings out to the side when at rest, but damselflies usually fold their wings up over their back when resting.

As with other species of insects, the dragonfly has six legs but it is unable to walk on solid ground. Their large compound eyes contain up to 30,000 individual lenses. (Human eyes only have one.)  Because of this, the adult dragonfly can see nearly 360 degrees at all times.

It is their lucent wings that give them such amazing flight abilities. Dragonflies have two sets of wings. They don’t beat their wings in unison like other insects do. Their front wings can be going up while their backs ones are going down, giving them the ability to move up, down, forwards, backwards, side to side, and hover.  They flap their wings at about 30 beats per second (bps) (compared to a bee’s 300 bps) and can attain speeds of over 30 mph.

When you see two dragonflies flying through the air attached to one another, it is almost always a male and female mating. Male dragonflies can be very territorial, staking claim to a particular area alongside a pond or stream. When you see two adults chasing each other through the air, it is often one male chasing another from its territory.

Female dragonflies lay their eggs in or near water, often on floating or emergent plants. The dragonfly eggs hatch into nymphs (or larvae). The nymphs live beneath the water’s surface, from a few months up to five years. When the larva is ready to metamorphose into an adult, it climbs up a reed or other emergent plant.

Exposure to air causes the larva to begin breathing. The skin splits at a weak spot behind the head and the adult dragonfly crawls out of its old larval skin, pumps up its wings, and flies off to feed on midges and flies. After leaving the water and becoming flying insects, they only live for about a month during which they mate. Their phenomenally quick and accurate flight makes them well suited to eat other insects right out of the air. Fortunately, mosquitoes are one of their primary food sources.

One more dragonfly story: the week I was writing this piece [in July 2009], I was in the car with my son Allen when a dragonfly bounced into the windshield and slid down into the wipers. Allen asked if he should turn on the wipers to help set it free. I said I thought that might injure it more. So we pulled into a parking lot and Allen got out and gently untangled the dragonfly from the wiper. We thought it was injured so Allen intended to place the dragonfly on the ground in the shade of a bush. But as Allen lifted the dragonfly from its entrapment, it lifted up out of his hands, hovered a bit, then flew off. The look of wonder and joy on Allen’s face was a beautiful sight.

Kate Stockman is a multi-media 3-D artist living in Western North Carolina. She writes a column, The Hand-Crafted Life, for her local newspaper, and offers playshops under the name The Cre8tive Flow. This article is adapted and expanded from an article she wrote on her blog, Wanderings of a Wondering Mind, which was inspired by a crop circle showing a dragonfly design. You can read the original post here.