Damselfly on a flower bud
Enallagma sp.
Bluet · Brooklyn Botanic Garden · 17 June 2026
A newly emerged damselfly on a flower bud in the Botanic Garden in June, resting while its colours come in. Pond damselflies breed in the garden's ponds, and a freshly emerged one climbs a stem and waits.
The pale, almost bleached-out colouring is the sign: pond damselflies, the family that includes the bluets, take a day or so after emerging for their adult colours to develop fully, and this one hasn't got there yet. That makes a species-level call from a photograph essentially a guess. Genus is likely Enallagma, the bluets, but the diagnostic marks are exactly the ones colour hasn't finished revealing.
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