Unknown Forktail sp. (1 Viewer)

Cape May county NJ,

Could this be a Lilypad Forktail (Ischnura ellicotti)?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124863400@N02/14482586192/in/photostream/

Hi, lovely photo.

I'm not sure about Lilypad. My main reason for this is that I think they can generally be counted on to perch with the abdomen tip curled downward to touch the surface of what they're perched on (which generally is a lilypad). Although I see that Paulson has a photo of Lilypad on p 128 that isn't so curved, I also noticed that your damselfly's abdominal segment 9 has a lot of black on the dorsal side, and both Paulson and Lam show pretty much solid blue on the dorsal side of S9. So hence I'm thinking that it might not be Lilypad.

I'm wondering if it could be the andromorph Rambur's that I see described in both of these field guides? I've only seen the typical Rambur's with green thorax, but both books describe andromorph Rambur's females as sometimes having have a blue thorax. And the location of the black on that abdominal segment looks good (from what I know/can see here) for Rambur's. Otherwise, I'm really not sure.

(And hi everyone - I've been lurking here.)

That's a pretty awesome first post! thank you that is pretty helpful. I only own one field guide, The "Field Guide to Dragonflies and Damselflies of New Jersey". I looked closely at all the pictures in the field guide and couldn't get an exact match. The correct match is probably in the book and just doesn't show an angle that I can match up without some assistance. That being said, I notice that my guide has a few different color morphs for Rambur's that are not perfect matches, but its likely that there are morphs that are simply not shown in my guide. I will try to look it up online...

check out this image of Rambur's forktail that I just easily found on google images. Youre pretty good, I think this is pretty much a replica of my image haha!

http://www.jeffpippen.com/dragonflies/rambursforktail-f070825-1681brnswick.coz.jpg

I'm glad that helped, and thank you. I'm just getting to the point of figuring damselflies out, though, so I was glad you were asking about Lilypad since that's one of the few ones I feel pretty confident about!

Look at Stephen Cresswell's photos too