Dragonfly with Shrunken Head...or a case of Head Ripped Off?

The Update/Correction: Okaaaaayyyyyy.....I was bound and determined to see a shrunken head on this dragonfly. Now I'm not so sure, it's probably a head ripped off. It LOOKS like eyes and mandibles, but I have no good magnifier to put on it. I have found out that a dragonfly's brain is not necessarily in its head. "Ichabod", as I've named it, lived about 6 more days. Then I was reminded of how cockroaches can live without their head for a week. I have found newly emerged dragonflies with some kind of deformation, some not even making it out of the exuvia and dying half way through emergence. I am thoroughly creeped out by this episode. I am also reminded of how badly I need new glasses! Time for some bifocals for the closeup views.

The Original (Erroneous) Post and Observation:
?This morning I was moving plants out onto the patio, and saw what I thought was the body of a dragonfly laying there. I picked it up, thinking to set it aside and examine the remains later, try to identify the species. It looked to me like something had bitten the head off. I had it by the folded wings, and the legs started kicking. This creeped me out a little, and had me wondering how the body could keep moving without the head. I took it upstairs and set it in a container. A couple hours later I came indoors for something, looked at it again, poked at it with my finger. Legs started moving again. Surely it couldn't live that long without a head. So I grabbed it by the wings and peered at it closely. I realized that it wasn't headless, it had a shrunken deformed head, really bizarre looking. What really puzzles me is how the heck the thing managed to live out its larval stage with a shrunken head. The snapper swing-arm jaw must have been working. The mandibles on this adult are pretty much useless, it is doomed to starve to death. It's already weak, or it probably would have flown away while I was photographing it out in the bright sunlight.

Snow Goose

We've got a northern visitor in our back yard. This snow goose has been hanging around the lake shore the past couple of days, looks like it may have an injured wing. It trots up onto the lawn and grazes, swims quite well, looks like it's otherwise okay, just can't fly. I'm keeping an eye on it, hopefully it just needs a little time to rest and recover.

It was a dark and stormy night....

It started out as Quest for Treefrog, but after stumbling around the hillside by the frog pond for a bit in the dark there was a bright flash and a boom of thunder, so I skedaddled out of there. I headed down to the lake to see if there was a storm to be photographed, it headed across the east side of the lake and south. Lightning lit up the clouds, but didn't catch any bolts.

As I was standing there with the camera, I noticed bright flashes coming from the west, across the peninsula, so I headed over to the dock at the other bay, only to discover that I had been missing a good storm cloud on that side headed south.

That cloud had a nice big cumulus being lit up spectacularly by lightning. In one of the shots I did manage to catch a couple bolts. Looks like some kind of creepy outer-space alien monster from a B movie.

After all the storms had headed south, the sky above cleared, but I sat on the dock continuing to take long exposures of the night sky as the clouds lit up now and then in the distance. Lo and behold, I was lucky enough to catch a meteor in one of the late shots.

Waxing Gibbous Moon

This gets downright addictive. I was wanting to take more pictures as the moon waxes and wanes, but the weather's not cooperating.

Crescent Moon

I finally got the adapter so I can attach my camera to my Bushnell 60mm spotting scope, and have been playing around with it trying to shoot the moon. The exposure is okay, but I can't seem to get the shots really sharp. Still, fun to play with. Took some shots of the crescent moon 4 days past new last night, then took the barn door tracker setup out to the field and shot the moon as it was close to the Pleiades cluster and just over from Orion. Orion is my favourite constellation, easy to find, and lots of interesting things in that section of the sky. Have to see how much I can save this summer, I have dreams of a decent telescope.

Geese in the wind

Last night it looked like we may have been getting another good sunset, and I ran out to the back field, but it fizzled out by the time I got there. The geese have been coming over at dusk by the hundreds to settle in for the night on the marsh to the northwest. There was a strong wind blowing, and the entertainment began. As the geese came from the south and southeast in their V formations, and then lowered altitude towards the marsh, every now and then a sharp gust of wind would hit them. There were near collisions, geese getting flipped over, their tidy V formations suddenly being thrown into a jumble of birds that looked like a flock of drunken crows. I tried to photograph some of them, only got a few out-of-focus shots with the short lens and poor light, but here's a couple that show what a struggle the poor birds had in that wind. I am amazed at how quickly they managed to recover from being knocked around in the gusts.

One bird here got flipped right over.

Sunset

We had on/off clouds and wisps of rain yesterday, typical spring day. At sunset I noticed the sun peaking out from under a band of clear sky, and realized we may get a pretty sunset sky. I wasn't disappointed, got this "ring of fire". After a day of things going wrong around the house, at least this worked out.