One of the benefits of a yard with plenty of vegetation may also be a yard with plenty of insects. One of my favorite insects is the dragonfly — and I was lucky to observe a static dragonfly swarm just as I finished mowing the yard. I estimate there were more than 30 dragonflies, and they flew really fast over my backyard and garden and never slowed down or landed. They seemed undeterred by my mowing.
When I googled “dragonfly swarm”, I eventually found The Dragonfly Woman’s blog and her post about static swarms. She writes that dragonfly swarms are attracted whenever prey is particularly plentiful, and they can be related to weather, activity that stirs up insects (mowing, for example) and they can even learn to associate some objects or activity with prey (bug zappers, cars, people, weather fronts) and show up even in the absence of such prey.
The dragonfly in the photo on the right was hitching a ride on my kayak in 2010 in the area around the flooded Sanganois River.
I’m nearly always happy to welcome animals and insects that eat unwelcome bugs such as mosquitos and ticks – whether they are sublime, like the dragonflies, or even when they are not particularly pretty, like the opossums that visit my garden under cover of darkness (until they trigger the motion lights.)