Brown Dragonfly Sipping Nectar, Flower Garden, Plymouth, MI, USA

By Sandra Vartanian Dusbiber

Hi I am a Brown Dragonfly but some of you may know me as a Brown Hawker, the swamp Darner. I am one of the larger Dragonflies, about 3 inches long. I am pretty distinctive and easily recognized in flight by my brownish red body and bronze wings.

There are 3,600 kinds of dragonflies on this planet. You may not know this, but we do have sharp teeth and are very fierce hunters, and love to eat insects and our favorite which is eating 100's of mosquitoes in one day. Maybe one day you can see me or any Dragonflies in flight, because we can fly straight, up and down, and even side to side. Yes, we are insects and we start our wonderful life by hatching from and an egg under the water. Our Dragonfly baby is a called a Nymph, and live underwater in a non saltwater pond the first months of their life. I am proud to tell you that we are the fastest insects on Earth, flying up to 60 mph, and by increasing our speed instantly while flying up, down, backwards and forwards. Some of you may have seen me make a basket like shape with our legs and we then can scoop our prey up in flight which I think is cool for me to do.

We all come in different colors, and have a long body with transparent wings and compound eyes. We are proud also to tell you we are Carnivorous and that means our diet is insects and we catch our prey right in mid air. Regarding our compound eyes, we have two large compound ones, that give us nearly 360 degree vision, and we use 80 percent of our brain to process this visual information. We have three stages of our lifecycle, which starts with the egg, hatches into a Nymph or larva, then molt and become an adult dragonfly. We do spend much of our life as a Nymph or larva, in the water. Our pretty females can lay 1,500 eggs at one time.

If you see me some of you may think i am a Damselfly. The easiest way to tell the us two apart is by looking at our wings. I have wings that are flat and extended out from my body and the Damselfly has wings that fold when its resting above or along their body. We once appeared 300 million years ago, cool uh? I am seeing so many mosquitoes flying be me, and I will have to say goodbye for now until we see each other one of these days... So long...