Often the first and last dragonfly species of each year, assuming they don’t survive right on through a mild winter.  Not too large and not too small.  Boisterous and benign.

At White Rock Lake, most of the variegated meadowhawks (Sympetrum corruptum) I see look like the one above^[1]: a drab shade reminiscent of Brown 25^[2].

And yet if I drive just a short distance north to the Lake Lewisville Environmental Learning Area, this same species becomes altogether a different animal.

This one is darker with shades of crimson.  Still, the abdominal pattern is unmistakable, if not confusing for its vastly different color scheme.

An about-to-mate pair.  The female in the background is mostly blue while the male is mostly red^[3].

A different mating pair with a male (left) who is mostly red and a female (right) who is a combination of blue and brown.

Were it not for the behind-the-eye pattern and the abdominal pattern, both of which are evident no matter the colors involved, it would be easy to assume several different species are involved when in fact only one variegated species is seen.

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Notes:

[1] I have seen this species sporting other colors at WRL, including green, red, blue, and various combinations, though the Brown 25 model seems dominant.

[2] Brown 25 is a reference to one of the Uranus Corporation commercials from the 1974 movie The Groove Tube.  You can see the Brown 25 commercial here.

[3] For the mating pairs in the last two photos, it seems one could assume the males are almost always red.  That would be wrong.  I saw other pairs where the male was brown, green, blue, or a combination of colors, though the red males seemed most abundant at LLELA.

I saw my first dragonfly of 2009 on February 15.  This year the same species showed up almost four weeks later.  Harsh winter?  You betcha!

The variegated meadowhawk (Sympetrum corruptum) can survive year-round in Texas if winters are mild enough.  No one can say this winter was mild.