Red Dragonfly

shimmering lights
eternal dance
above the waves
- dragonfly

 (haiku from the elephant island)

Walking around a pond in the warm evening sun I found these pairing dragonflies, or Odonata , which is the more correct term I learned. However, the red dragonfly connected to the yellow one for quite some time, they were both flying and it was fascinating how safe they were navigating thru the dense grass without touching any blades.
After reading several articles about them, another interesting fact seemed to me that these fragile insects, or at least their ancestors, the giant dragonflies, already existed on earth since around 300 million years. That's a lot of time. - In comparison, the first monkey like humans turned up not even 10 thousand years ago.

On Wikipedia I found this nice shot of an odonata fossil:

(cropped image, original source photo: wikipedia)

A sidenote on gear: I normally don't talk much about gear, because it's not so very important for me, but maybe this might be usefull for others. For all the following photos I turned the "autofocus function" of my telezoom lens OFF. I takes some training time to focus manually on fast moving objects, but it's worth it, because the Autofocus often gets confused by several objects, can't decide what to focus and annoyingly starts to zoom forwards and back - until the right moment is gone or the object is mis-focused.