Outgrown

Day 232: It was windier than expected today, so rather than letting the kayak drift in the middle of Swofford Pond while I ate my lunch, I tucked in behind a half-submerged fallen tree with the 'yak's bow on the margin of the shore, the restless waves rocking the boat like a cradle. Not much to see on Swofford, I was thinking (although I'd found a beaver lodge), and I'd given up any hope of fishing after discovering what had made that brittle snapping noise when I'd taken bags of groceries out of the car a few days earlier. Yep, the tip of my $17 6.5-foot, 40-year old Shakespeare kiddy rod had split when I jerked instead of analyzing why a sack was stuck. It was clearly beyond any hope of redemption, but fishing was out of the question. Well, I'd come to paddle, and fishing would have just been a bonus. The day wasn't a total loss, catastrophic failure of equipment notwithstanding. The beaver lodge would do nicely for a blog shot, I thought, and then my eye fell on this touching scene: a dragonfly offering its farewells to the nymphal husk which had housed it fairly recently.

With deep shadows and the boat bobbing up and down on the waves, I had no alternative but to use a a higher ISO than I liked, hence the graininess of the image. However, to my delighted surprise, the dragonfly lifted off before I had finished my lunch, allowing me to retrieve the nymph casing to photograph it in better light.

A dragonfly begins its life cycle when it emerges from the egg as a naiad, an aquatic phase which may last several years. When the naiad is ready to metamorphose into an adult dragonfly, it climbs up the stem of any handy grass or reed, and as the shell begins to dry and the larva starts to breathe, the shell splits down the back. The adult dragonfly then works its way free, remaining with the empty husk until its wings have completely unfurled and are ready for flight, as this specimen did today as I looked on.