Birding on Broadmeade Pond Watch

Five folks met me Saturday morning for the monthly Pond Watch migratory dragonfly observation. It was a bit warm, but a little cooler than in previous months. At the meeting spot by the Parmer Village pond there were a few Blue dashers in a tree. Here's one:

And in the same tree there were briefly a couple Citrine Forktails, our smallest damselfly. I finally got my camera to focus on this one:

Of the five species that Pond Watch tracks, Variegated Meadowhawk and Spot-winged Glider were absent, and we only saw about 5 Wandering Gliders. But Common Green Darners and Black Saddlebags were both abundant, hunting over the creek bed, mating, and laying eggs in the pond at the last dam on the creek. We even found a perching Black Saddlebags that I was able to photograph:

I was excited to be able to show the group our smallest dragonfly, a male Eastern Amberwing, that we found in the creek bed. These guys are at most just one inch long:

It felt like dragonfly diversity was less than last month, but we ended up finding just as many species (15). And a new one was Twelve-spotted Skimmer, which has started being seen in the Austin area just in the past few weeks. Unfortunately the nice male we observed did not perch for a photo. We did have a nice Roseate Skimmer male perch for us, which I can rarely resist photographing:

Here's our complete dragonfly list:

1. American Rubyspot
2. Black Saddlebags
3. Blue Dasher
4. Blue-ringed Dancer
5. Citrine Forktail
6. Common Green Darner
7. Eastern Amberwing
8. Eastern Pondhawk
9. Four-spotted Pennant
10. Powdered Dancer
11. Rambur's Forktail
12. Roseate Skimmer
13. Swift Setwing
14. Twelve-spotted Skimmer
15. Wandering Glider

And here are a few more photos. What a fun morning!