Off on a field trip to Costa Rica

Kinda like our girl friends, you don't need clever when you got pretty.Oh, god, I didn't say that! I feel like Tim Hunt.Someone shoot me before I turn into a republican!

A quick slap to the back of the head should get you back on track.

When we found the damselfly Cora terminalis (Message 101) in Bolivia I was with my closest friend. We have been travelling together since 1983 despite living 1500 miles apart and have been on close to 75 trips in search of dragonflies and other photo subjects.Here is a shot of us from this last summer in Pennsylvania when we were shooting Calopteryx amata Message 31, taken by one of our other travel companions. She made up the limerick too. Anyway, when we discovered C. terminalis I was trying to shoot another Cora species along a noisy stream with cataracts. Excited yells from the edge of the forest got my attention and when I was close enough to understand, my friend told me there was a damselfly with flashing silver wings along the small forest stream. No verbal description can convey how spectacular this wing display really is.We searched for nymphs but were unsuccessful, so as far as we know there is nothing known about the life history of C. terminalis or Polythore boliviana. And indeed this is true for many of the tropical species we have found. Apparently, there are only 5 of us who have studied dragonflies and damselflies in Bolivia in the past 150 years. Many species are disappearing from habitat loss before they have even been discovered by science.

Hey, but I do have a 'clever' comment.When I was a little kiddie, my parents told me that damselflies were wasps. Damselflies are found near water...I had been stung by wasps a few times. Painful indeed. They told me that wasps would sting me to death. I believed them.It actually was a 'clever' (and effective) way of preventing me from going to ponds and rivers and swimming pools on my own and possibly drowning.Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.

when the young girl was asked why she took off her dress and threw it over the bug, she replied "now you have a damsel in dis dress to rescue ..."

In Message 31 I posted some shots from my trip to a dragonfly meeting in Pennsylvania. I am sorting and processing more images from that trip and ran across this one of an Anax longipes male in flight. We do not have this beautiful species in the west and this was my first time seeing it close enough to photograph. I posted a shot of a female in Message 31.