Life a Viceroy day and Odonate predation

Viceroy Day

Out at the river by 8. The Johnson grass was still wet with dew and the air had the first bit of a feel of fall.. although it really is only late summer. Perched on the low cottonwood shrub where I drop my pack there was a beautiful Viceroy, basking. The back left wing had been damaged (likely by a glancing 'peck' of a bird). The right wing was immaculate, orange and black, beautiful. Then there were two other Viceroys flying. Then there were six. May have been a recent emergence of late adults.

With the recent half inch rain we received Friday, the sand levee was smoothed with a new crust. Below the stream outflow, a beaver had emerged from the river, clawed up the foot high sand dune cliff and sashayed thirty feet across the sand to the stand of young willows. The curving track of its tail left me imagining a beaver in the predawn dark, dancing or waddling happily on it way to its meal. It had cut a small sapling at the base and dragged it back to the water. The story was there in tracks it left across the sand.

The river had risen a bit so that sand bars in the middle were mostly covered. I walked slowly across, enjoying the tug of the brown flowing water at my knees and thighs until I was across to near the far bank and briefly in surprisingly chilly water up to my chest. Partly submerged in the river, I walked backwards, facing away from the sun, watching robins, cardinals and sparrows foraging through the shrubs and exposed hanging roots. As usual, there were dozens of Hetaerina rubyspot damselfly males flitting from perches along the bank. I thought for a moment how the male rubyspots were coming to the end of their summer. In a month or two their lives will be complete. There will still be many more wonderful dawns, more days above the brown river watching; but these males are no longer young. They are on the home stretch. For an instant I felt the same. Then a pair of foraging robins flitted into view. In their lives, this is a season of plentiful food. A time to enjoy life to the full in preparation for the coming winter and the following new spring. I am a bit like the robin and a bit like the rubyspots.

At the tip of a cottonwood that had collapsed into the river, there was a sudden flurry as a green female Erythemis dragonfly pondhawk  encountered a male rubyspot.. and to my surprise captured it. The Erythemis flew a meter to a cottonwood twig perch low above the water and began to deliberately chew on the head of the rubyspot. I watched the slow process from inches away.

I stepped away down stream watching the bank carefully for the beaver who lives there; but there were only damselflies flitting between their perches.