It Was Worth The Wait!

What a morning!

I was out of the house before the twilight hours and did not get home again till six hours later.  And, no, I do not have another sunrise photo to boot but I have had a field day with birds and dragonflies.  Even the cows had put on a head-butting show for me!

The truth is that I had intended to get more photos of the dawn skies but it just did not happen.  Not that the sky was not pretty this morning but I wanted to check out another location and it was the wrong choice.  Anyway, that spurred me to move on to other sites and it was a step in the right direction for the rest of the morning.  Lucky!

After checking out a few ponds and found to my dismay that the dragonflies seem to be sleeping in, I spent a fair bit of time birdwatching instead.  And it was great!  But the birds and the cows would be for another story and that can wait till another day.

What I am excited about is the dragonfly that I finally did identify today.  I have mentioned this red dragonfly before in one of my earlier ramblings.

Anyway, there were two different species that I saw this morning that I have yet to identify for the Langkawi checklist.  But I scored one.  Both are rather large dragonflies, one is red and the other is brown.  Both were patrolling a big area in the padi fields, their paths sometimes intersect, but they were not bothered about each other.  And both were flying up and down and around everywhere quite relentlessly.  From time to time, they would disappear from the fields but I could not see where they had gone to perch.

I found a shady spot and sat to watch the dragonflies.  After a long wait, the large, red dragonfly finally did perch on a twig high up in a tree next to me and I was in a mad, mad scramble to get the right setting on my camera to shoot it.  I was not the most successful, but I did get one photo.  Lucky, again!

 

 

This mysterious red dragonfly is the Tramea transmarina of the family Libellulidae.  It is a large dragonfly with the male having hindwing length of 43mm and recognised by the dark patch at the base of its hindwing.  The Pocket Guide says that this species is widespread in tropical Asia. 

It also says that the female has brown abdomen... so that makes me wonder?

So far, this is only the second time I have seen this dragonfly and I had spotted just two individuals this morning so it does not seem to be a common species to me, or at least not locally abundant here.  Add to that, the last one was eaten up by a Bee-eater!

And, actually, I do have another photo of the morning sky...