northeast-flora-and-fauna

This damselfly, a Fragile Forktail , was perched on some sort of vegetation protruding from the water. You can see 1 of their more helpful field marks, exclamation points [1] on their thorax [2] pretty clearly. Less easy to see is the forked tail that indicates this as 1 of our forktail damselflies . You also can't see it clearly in this Eastern Forktail from the previous year; I continue to blame this on their small size.  Now you know how it got the forktail part of its name. It's claimed that it got the fragile part of its name because of the delicate body/wings of these damselflies. While I'm sure the body and wings are delicate by human standards, I'm really not convinced that they're more fragile than the body and wings of other forktail damselflies; certainly none of them evoke an image of robustness or strength. It's not like the description is wrong, it's just that the description also seems to be true of our other forktails. Though male forktails ...

Though some of the larger damselflies (like the Ebony Jewelwing ) are easy to spot by anyone paying attention, I'll frequently see some smaller ones like this Eastern Forktail . Unfortunately the small size of most forktails makes it easy to lose sight of them, especially when they're not moving. They get the forktail name because for most of these species the males have a slightly forked tip at the end of their abdomens but given their small size this characteristic probably won't be easily spotted if you run across one. This is a heteromorphic female forktail, which my field guide [1] defines as a "dull morph in female odonates with 2 color morphs". Some other Eastern Forktails are considered andromorphic, defined as "bright (usually male-like) morph in female odonates with 2 color morphs". These terms are apparently only used when females have 2 different morphs; if a species has no colorful morph in the females they aren't all called heteromorp...