When I was a kid, I remember one of them sitting on the very tip of my fishing rod as I sat out in a boat on the Michigan Upper Peninsula’s Duck Lake, where my family used to vacation. An inch and a half long, its toothpick-thin sunlit body a bright, almost luminous blue, wings nearly invisible, it hung there motionless unless I moved the rod tip, whereupon it lifted off, hovered a moment, and alit again the instant the rod went still.
I thought this was a little dragonfly. I wasn’t far off – it was a damselfly, a member of the same order of insects (Odonata). Damsel is an apt label – these creatures look and act feminine when compared to their bigger and more boisterous cousins. At rest, they hold their four clear membrane wings not out to the sides but folded over the back, tilted upward, front to back. In flight, they don’t rattle like dragonflies; they are silent, the wings gently flickering as they glide over the water.
Many damselflies are brightly colored, more so than dragonflies, in green, red, blue, yellow. Like dragonflies, these are water creatures, spending most of their lifecycle submerged in a nymph stage. Their mode of feeding gives the lie to their feminine bearing: They are fierce predators. As they fly, they use hairs on their hind legs to snare smaller insects, then chew them up.
You surely have damsels these damsels on your lake. Watch for them around reed beds and anywhere green plants emerge from the water. If you’re lucky, one or two of them may pay a visit while you’re out in the boat fishing. They provide a nice diversion while you patiently wait for a bobber to go down.
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