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 ...

I believe this is my 1st sighting (and picture) of a Fragile Forktail . This is one of our smaller damselflies , probably small enough that I missed spotting them; certainly they're documented as "common" throughout NJ. (My recollection is that the guy below darted off soon after my picture was taken.) You should be able to see one of their main field marks: they have "exclamation marks" on the top of their thorax. If you look at the thorax, you can see a pair of elongated green spots, and at the back of the thorax you should see a pair of green dots. These are considered to resemble a pair of exclamation marks. It sounds like they have generally like the habitat around lily pads, and I saw this fella at a dried-out lily pad pond (see the 1st picture here ). Perhaps I should scout out lily pads more for damselflies? August 3, 2022 at Lord Stirling Park Photo 222580785, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)