Thunderclouds and Birch trees

The ups and downs of life - nature, society,

This was on Monday, on the Carden Alvar.

Quite a changeable day,

We saw maybe a dozen different birds that we could identify with potentially many more for the experts.

Hope the ill wind brings some good to Carden and Ontario,

sincerely,

wob

Black saddlebags full of dragonflies?

I was amazed by the number of nearly identical dragonflies flitting about me at Carden yesterday. I tried counting them and maybe 15-20 indivudals within 10m of me for minutes at a time followed by intervals with just 1 or 2 flying patrol. Around 2-3 pm they vanished for about an hour before returning as before. The car thermometer read 22C.
On 1 photo I think I see a black saddlebag. There were no callico or halloween pennants apparently.
Here are a few images beginning with the clearest, sadly not good, observation of a blackbag:

The sharpest image is this one:

A word about the shots. I worked from fixed focus most of the time at 3-4m. Sometimes I was able to focus real time on one but pressing the shutter was usually too late. Otherwise, it is the old story: of you want to marry a prince you have to kiss a lot of frogs.

 Note that dragonflies have 4 wings which are controlled independently.
Fascinating creatures - wob