Does This Happen to Everyone? (Part 2)

This morning, stalled in traffic and bored (tree cutters ahead), I opened the windows, turned off the car, and snapped this picture (thinking I could get mileage with a colleague who was more than an hour late to tutoring because of a huge traffic jam in her very large city). 

As soon as I snapped the picture, it happened.

A huge dragonfly buzzed me at my window. I am not kidding. A Green Darner. It zoomed across the highway, over my car, hovered, zoomed back, and so on, for at least five passes. I'm sure the people behind me thought I was crazy. (I might have had the person doing the neck-craning been someone else.) But crane my neck I did and look and look and look.

This wasn't the first unexpected ode encounter of the week. Three days ago, within about half an hour of walking in my front door, I walked out again and, when I turned around to lock it, saw a beautiful, fresh, female Calico Pennant caught in a spider web. She had not been there thirty minutes earlier, but now she was -- and still alive. Of course, I removed her and pulled spider string from her so she could fly. And she did.

Then, this afternoon, I stood at the fish pond in Abbo's Alley, looking for Great Blue Skimmers. I placed myself behind a tree at the edge of the pond, so I wouldn't startle a dragonfly. I decided to step to the right a bit, and as soon as I started to move, caught sight of a Great Blue directly in front of me, perched on the tree. I snappedsnappedsnapped before he flitted away. (Tree on the left of the frame. I was so close that I couldn't even focus on the whole insect.)

More and more, I have come to think of myself as the odonate whisperer.

Hear me roar! (They won't care since they can't hear!)

For "Does This Happen to Everyone (Part 1)," click here.