Image of Eastern Amberwing

Description:

"22 September 2014: Observed a female Eastern Amberwing (Perithemis tenera) perching on the edge of one of four lakes at Railroad Park in Lewisville, Texas. This park is located adjacent to the Elm Fork Trinity River and is a major baseball and dog park, as well as a jogging site, for residents of the city and region. Fishing is also a major activity at the park by those thus inclined. Unbeknownst to most, it is also an excellent site for watching and photographing dragonflies and damselflies as well as related riparian flora and fauna. If you're in the area it's worth making a trip to the site. One can walk the banks of the man-made ponds or lakes and get some great exercise at the same time. The Eastern Amberwing dragonfly is arguably one of the smallest dragonflies throughout its range. And it is a very extensive range indeed. John C. Abbott's range map in his Dragonflies of Texas: A Field Guide (University of Texas Press, 2015) clearly marks this species as being distributed throughout the entire state of Texas. He noted that it is common across its range and wherever ""suitable habitat"" is found, there you will also find the small but colorfully dressed Eastern Amberwing. Odonata Central states succinctly that the Eastern Amberwing's range is found in ""Eastern and Central United States, southeastern Canada and Mexico."" If one could draw a straight line on the map from southeastern Arizona to northwest Wisconsin, one would more or less effectively have drawn the line for the range of this dragonfly. To the west of the line the Eastern Amberwing does not fly, to the east of the line, it does. This means that Eastern Amberwing finds its way into the most southeastern Canadian provinces across the Great Lakes, where it establishes its northernmost range. Eastern Amberwings then traverse into Mexico at the border shared between the United States and Mexico in Texas and New Mexico primarily but to a lesser extent as noted the southeastern border of Arizona. Dennis R. Paulson and Enrique González Soriano have provided the best online and readily available list of ""Mexican Odonata"" (hosted online by the Slater Museum of Natural History, University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Washington), a national distribution list prepared originally in 1994, and revised this year in June 2015. According to these scholarly students of Mexican odonates, Eastern Amberwings occur in at least five of Mexico's thirty-one states including Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Sonora and Tamaulipas. One would think that with some focused effort colleagues in Nuevo León would be able to confirm the presence of Eastern Amberwing in that northeastern state as well. Nuevo León borders Texas at a geographic point where Eastern Amberwing appears to be quite abundant. The Eastern Amberwing dragonfly is an authentic North American species because it is found in Mexico, the United States and Canada. Its most extensive range is easily found in the continental United States. Railroad Park is administered by the City of Lewisville, Texas."