We have a biologist friend who, when writing papers about difficult-to-find/uncommon/even rare critters will use the phrase, “common where found” to indicate that while the species may be difficult to find, if you do find it, you may find several (or more) of them.
Furtive Forktails, Ischnura prognata, has the reputation of being hard to find, but I’m finding it’s more a case of “common where found” because they seem to be fairly common in the swamp near us. I’ve found them in significant numbers twice this summer season, once in late July/early August and again the second week of October. both times were about 10 days or so after rainfall.
We’ve been having a drought here for the last few years so a lot of the species, including birds, just haven’t been around. I haven’t seen a Wood Duck in ages, for example, because there just isn’t enough water in the swamp for them. However, after Hurricane Ian visited us as a tropical storm in early October, I was surprised to see even more Ischnura prognata floating around the swamp than I’d seen earlier in the season.
In early August, I was finding them floating around patches of Lizard’s Tail along the shallow muddy runs (streams) in the middle of the wooded swamp. I specify “wooded swamp” because there are areas where there are runs but not a lot of trees and those areas don’t host the Ischnura prognata the way the shady areas in the woods do.
Interestingly enough, now (mid-October) I’m not finding them around the Lizard’s Tail but instead, they appear in even larger numbers amongst the sedges and grasses that border the mud flats and banks of shallow sections of the runs. It’s interesting because they appear to have changed the type of plant they prefer at this time of year and they seem to be more numerous now than they were in mid-summer.
However, I should note that for most of the summer, I could almost always find at least a few of these damselflies in the swamp when I walked through vegetation near shallow muddy sections of the runs. They would delicately float up above the plants and then test a few locations before gently alighting again.
The Furtive Forktails are really beautiful damselflies and fairly easy to identify.
Both male and female Furtive Forktails are fairly long–much longer than damselflies like the Fragile Forktail. Paying close attention to which segments of the abdomen are blue will tell you if you are looking at a Furtive Forktail. The Furtive has blue only on S9 with a little blue on the sides of S10. Rambur’s has S8 blue and the sides of S9 only–not the entire S9 segment. The Eastern male has S8-9 mostly blue.
The female is a little like the female Citrine forktail, but it is much larger/longer and the Furtive has more dorsal black abdominal segments than either the Citrine or the Eastern. It has less orange on the abdominal segments than Rambur’s Forktail.
The female once it is mature will have a greenish thorax with a black dorsal stripe and brownish shoulder area but immature females will have an orange (or orange-red) thorax with a black dorsal stripe as shown above.
These are lovely, delicate damselflies and I’m always thrilled to see them float up a few inches above the vegetation when I step near one of the runs in the swamp. And like our friend says, they are “common where found.”
