Stones and Whitetails

I've written elsewhere about how I love making stone walls. The last long flowerbed I built has the best walls, and it's out in all day sun, where the whitetails hunt. I don't mean deer - I mean the dragonflies. They love to settle on a stone in the heat, and every few minutes they fly up for a quick looped reconnaissance, then land again on the stone. We've had at least three in the yard every year now for as long as I've had stones in the sun.

Older males have an all white abdomen, like the upper right photo in the composite above (taken in our gardens). The others were in the flower bed, on various stones, and might be females or immature males. Two more were on the long stone and earth steps that I built years ago going down the hill (photo), including a smaller male with a white tail.

I was taking the photos of the live dragonflies when I noticed that this was the bed where oldest son placed his dragonfly sculpture this year (lower right of the composite photo). We bought it for Christmas or his birthday one year, and he places it every spring, along with the other creatures.