Common Green Darner
Anax junius
Common Green Darner · Brooklyn Botanic Garden · 26 July 2025
A tandem pair of Common Green Darners at the pond in the Botanic Garden in July, the male grasping the female behind the head while she curls down to lay eggs into a torn lily pad. Green darners breed in still water across the whole of North America and are the big dragonfly of every park pond.
They are among the few dragonflies known to migrate. A generation hatched in the north flies south in autumn, breeds, and dies, and it is their offspring that fly north again the following spring, a relay nobody understood until the 2010s.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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