When I first bought my home in central Woodland six years ago, there wasn't much in the yard to interest dragons: a mature orange tree that produced amazingly delicious navel oranges in the winter, a human-planted valley oak on the street out front, and squirrel-planted valley oak too close to my neighbor's fence line that looks ready to wallop my workshop. The rest of my small yard was Bermuda grass that burped up a fluffy clouds of invasive oxalis in the early spring and then reverted back to tired looking grass when the summer heat arrived. Nothing of interest, really, for a dragon. They aren't that interested in acorns or sorrel salad, and thankfully, they don't care for amazingly delicious oranges either because, of course, dragons are carnivores.

I quickly (well maybe not so quickly, it took a couple years) dug up and lasagna'ed the lawn and set up some garden beds and patches of native plants. It was only a few years after that that I started to spot the dragons: a flame skimmer resting on a corn stalk, a blue-eyed darner lurking among the peach leaves. This left me somewhat confused because I did not believe that dragons would be interested in my land-locked urban lot.

I'm talking about dragonflies of course and there are no bodies of water anywhere near me. Everyone knows that dragonflies are aquatic insects, right? How did they end up here? I wondered if they had blown in from Cache Creek somehow or maybe hitched a ride over from the Yolo Bypass. They didn't seem to stay long. It wasn't until recently when I saw about a half dozen of what appeared to be four-spot pennants darting and swooping about ten feet overhead in the early evening that I began to put it all together.

Dragonfly larvae are aquatic, but the adults certainly aren't, and with a cruising speed of about 16 kilometers per hour (10 mph), why wouldn't they stretch their wings and see the world? Just like birds or, closer to the mark, butterflies, many species of dragonflies migrate. While the migratory routes of butterflies like the Monarchs are well known, dragonfly movements are still something of a mystery. However, one of note, the appropriately named globe skimmer dragonfly, has been tracked from India to East Africa and over to Middle Asia, a total distance of 14,000 km (8,700 miles). https://india.mongabay.com/2021/11/high-flying-dragons-how-the-globe-skimmer-migrates-across-the-indian-ocean/

Like the Monarch butterfly, dragonfly migrations may take several generations as the insect swarms (I find the collective name ‘flight' more appropriate for dragonflies) follow a shifting path of ancestral pools. Some dragonfly flights follow the same flyways as hawks, and groups like the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory have added the occasional bug count to their seasonal observations of birds of prey. https://www.parksconservancy.org/park-e-ventures-article/smaller-winged-creatures-flying-through-headlands

I can't say for sure that the changes to my yard have inadvertently resulted in a bit of dragon habitat, but likely there are some additional tasty bug snacks now that merit a dragon flyby. I am happy to host them so long as they stick to eating mosquitoes, gnats, and any pests that are eyeballing my garden, and leave the oranges to me.

A Dragon(fly)! Blue-eyed darner (photos by JD Trebec)

and a Damsel(fly)! Arroyo bluet

Note: Accuracy of amateur insect identification may be questionable beyond the Genus level!