Dragonfly ID Part 1 - Male Darters and Skimmers

Male Black-tailled Skimmer

Menorca has 2 Darters, 2 Skimmers and the Broad Scarlet, all of which are quite distinctive when one is looking at mature males. However many of the individuals that you will come across will be immatures and females and in the field these can be quite confusing.

Lets get the males out the way first

If the dragonfly is blue it is a male and is either a Black-tailed skimmer, pictured above, or a Keeled Skimmer, pictured below. The Black-tailed Skimmer has a black tail and the Keeled Skimmer does not. The Black-tailled Skimmer also has black pterostigma whilst the Keeled Skimmer has large yellow pterostigma.

Male Keeled Skimmer at Es grau

A red dragonfly is either a Broad Scarlet, a Red-veined Darter or a Common Darter.If it is bright red with a red face and no black on legs it is a Broad Scarlet. The jizz of a Broad Scarlet is different from that of the other darters and after seeing a few it is easy to pick them out. It has a very broad flat looking abdomen and the scarlet is very intense; you don't usually have to look that closely to tell them apart. Both are in the picture shown below.

Red-veined darter and Broad Scarlet

The two male Sympetrum's are harder to tell apart but the Red-veined Darter is redder than the Common Darter; the underside of its eyes are blue whilst the Common Darters are greeny; the Red-veined Darter has red veins and a more pronounced yellow patch at the base of the hindwind and the Common darter doesn't have red veins and a very small yellow hindwind patch.

Male Common Darter

Male Red-veined Darter at Es grau

   

Red-Veined Darter

Red-Veined Darters are one of my favorite dragonflies. Once you have your eye in they are easy to tell from the other darters you get on Menorca. The give away is that the lower half of the eye is blue, this can be seen from the image above.  Also in this picture you can see the orange-red veins that give this species its common name. This photo of a female was taken at the start of the Algender Gorge. 

By comparison this is a male. This photo was taken at Es Grau and shows the abdomen of the male is much thinner than that of the female and is quite red in colour. The pterostigma can be seen in the  photos of the male and female and are distinctive.

After mating these dragonflies stay in tandem to oviposit and I have seen then egg laying at quite a few locations where there is some still water. On one occasion I sew a pair in tandem over the sea and egg-laying into the Med.

The Red-Veined Darter is found in all of Southern Europe and North Africa and some of Asia and can be found in all months of the year. It is one of the few european dragonflies were their is more than one generation a year and a generation can be in a little as 3 months. In Menorca it is one of the dragonflies you see earliest in the year. It is also migratory and so in good years it is apt to spread northward in Europe and is even found as far north as England

The scientific name of the Red-Veined Darter is Sympetrum fonscolombii, but you sometimes see the name misspelt as fonscolombei.   It is likely that in the future the  Red-Veined Darter will be moved from the genus Sympetrum and placed into a new genus. This is because the behaviour of the Red-Veined Darter is different from the other Sympetrum darters, its life cycle is different and most inportantly because of genetic differences.