On Monday, Tom Forwood and I spent a couple of throughly enjoyable hours at the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge and Bass Creek. The first we found was a racer near my home along the Bitterrooot River (what a treat to have a racer stay still and pose). We had originally arrived thinking of birding, and to be sure we birded. We found lots of ID challenges with waterfowl in eclipse plumages and swarms of flycatching species. The real stars of the show were the dragonflies, which offer an entirely different set of identification challenges (especially for a color-blind dude like myself). In the afternoon, we ventured up Bass Creek for some distance, and we found Western Skink, Northern Alligator Lizard, Common Garter Snake, and Woodland Skipper. Following are the best and most representative images of our dragonflies and our day.
