Yeah, I’ve been assuming they’re feeding, as they’ll often do a quick swooping motion that’s presumably them diving at prey. Hopefully they’re eating the mosquitoes.
We’ll have a scattering of them pretty much all day this time of year, and then in the late afternoon they’ll abruptly start to multiply in numbers, with two or three dozen showing up some days. We’re roughly half a mile from a river, so my guess is that they mainly live down there and are coming up here in the evenings to feed over the various open lawns, but I’ll definitely have to try looking along the treeline in case any stay overnight.
I think there might be too much light pollution for moth lights to accomplish much in my immediate area, though I need to remember to check out the front wall of a local drugstore more often, as they get a lot of interesting bugs coming to their lights in particular. I could also check how late the local parks with rivers in them are open and try moth-and-dragonfly lighting there, though I’d need a ton of bug repellent for the mosquitoes.
I’ve only caught four in-flight dragonflies so far, plus this Common Whitetail perched in the backyard last month. Of those four, I’m pretty sure this one is one of the saddlebags, and I’ve taken INat’s suggestion of “Rainpool Gliders” for this one, this one, and this one, as I’m not yet confident in IDing most dragonflies and that looks about right.
Ah, and as I write this comment, they’ve already been IDed as all the same species. I have the beginning of an impression that these particular dragonflies more readily come within net-swinging range- will need to keep an eye out and see if that holds up under further observation.
(I will also be refining my photography skills. I need to remember to be in good lighting, I’m going to have to work out how not to have the shadow of the mesh on them too much, and I think I need a larger cage so I can more easily get photos at a less awkward angle. Really a lot of the problem is that putting the camera inside the cage means it’s hard for me to see the display screen and check if the photo is going to be good, but it’s either that or try to photograph them through the cage, because I don’t want to either restrain them or chill them to photograph them outside the cage.)
Plenty of photos, I can do! I might have trouble getting shots of the faces with how they’re contained, but I can definitely try, and the abdomen is easy enough.
Most of the dragonflies I see are fairly nondescript, brown to reddish-brown with small or no wing markings. I assume a lot of them are females of species with flashy males. There are also some that look like one of the Saddlebag Gliders, and when the numbers get larger there always seem to be one or two that are a sort of light yellowish color. I’ve seen Widow Skimmers in the past, but not this year, though that might just be me missing them when they turn up.
There was an especially interesting one today: a larger dragonfly (though not huge) that looked dark gray or black, but occasionally had a dark blue sheen to it when the light caught it right, with large dark ‘saddlebag’ markings at what looked like the bases of all four wings and a thin band of white about 2/3 of the way down its abdomen. Sadly I didn’t manage to catch it, as it left pretty quickly, either because it could feel the rain coming in and wanted to leave early or because it had realized I was following it in particular. Hopefully it’ll come back, because I don’t see anything that looks quite right when I look through the Central Texas dragonfly observations on INat and I’m curious what it was.